


All the Waves in Her Atmosphere

by furrywing



Category: District 9 (2009)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alien Culture, F/M, Interspecies Romance, Revolution, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2020-12-26 23:50:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 41,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21109214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/furrywing/pseuds/furrywing
Summary: Far outside of the eyes of Joburg, unrest grows in District 10. Wikus just focuses on survival, afraid he'll be the next person to go missing.  But coerced into helping the poleepkwa's underground press, he resigns himself to becoming a translator, knowing MNU is searching for those responsible for publishing political dissent.Back home, Tania’s soul calls for her to flee. Faced with social ostracism, she struggles to reclaim her life and identity while maintaining appearances; primarily, she's shamed by her deceased husband and despises everything nonhuman. Soon overwhelmed, she promises herself she'll find what really happened in D9 and to Wikus, even if it destroys her place in the human world and forces her to enter D10 at last.(Kinda accidentally turned into full on sequel to the film. Whoops.)





	1. She Calls

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy, I updated the summary bc these plot bunnies evolved into something wilder than I expected, into an outright sequel, complete with occassional sprinkles of 'found footage' (illegal poleepkwa newspaper snippings, 'City of Decay'). :D I'm excited! 
> 
> A tale of two soulmates searching for one another while the world around them sets aflame!
> 
> I call Tania/ Wikus... Prawnia haha. If you enjoy this madness, thank you, you legend.
> 
> Take the interspecies romance tag to heart; Wikus ain't human, things happen. lol. 
> 
> The archive warnings don't apply, but content warnings are for the same themes in the film. This isn't meant to be a sad story but if anything in there would trigger you, it's probably in here too, even if it's just a reference to a past event. And since it occurs to me some people might not know those themes if they never saw the film, they include human (and nonhuman) rights violations, medical torture, trauma, loss of bodily autonomy, dysphoria, and xenophobia. There are a couple of references to sexual assault but it's not depicted, nor does it actually occur.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The drawing that kind of spurred me into this whole affair. I think I'll include connected fan art here on out, like I do for my other fic.

Night came over the shanty town, riding a warm wind and suffocating humidity that would not relent under unseasonably hot temperatures, the daytime cracking well over thirty degrees according to the thermometer hanging in the main room.

At the edge of that room Wikus sat, leaning against the wall, three fingers tapping a frustrated little song. A scavenged clock ticked in tune with him, a quiet chime announcing the hour. The noise made him antsy and impatient, enhancing his irritation but he couldn't stop. Cutting through the silence he wished the rhythm might settle his thoughts so he might focus.

Because he'd spent an hour trying to thread a tiny needle and couldn't. Other people in the district could do simple things like this fine. It was better than a year ago, he had to remind himself without much joy. Back then he'd be lucky if he could open a clasp or a jar without maiming it.

Nothing was helped by this oppressive, itching heat and Wikus scratched another scale off his hand. What he really needed was a river, a pool, anything cold. Something not reminiscent of tepid well water.

He wished for the morning to bring a crisper light and burn the humidity away. Only the main room of his shack had electricity, lit by a single yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling, that cast star-like spectres of light into the shack, courtesy of a lampshade he'd made to escape a fit of self-pity. Not the best decision, it limited the already dim light and looked just as out of place as the rest of the clutter in the tiny shack, much of it stringed to large metal hoops, the final remnants of what had once been a hooped tent. Just like his life, the shack had slowly grown into something else entirely.

Most of the district had evolved in this direction. Some of the tents had become supplemented by cardboard, then corrugated metal, old lumber, discarded brick. Others had simply piled on more canvas or thick rugs or plastic sheeting and retained much of their original shape. Anything that could make a sturdier wall or cover a gap of torn or mouldering canvas. Because they weren't truly fenced in, and most people brought home an income (however pitiful), people transported in all manner of things.

In the sunlight the district was a chaotic hodgepodge of colour. Even small shrubs and saplings had sprung up in the ground that MNU had flattened, so in the summer time, while hellish in other ways, it wasn't all that bleak to look at. Not entirely pleasant; it was still a shanty town reeking of poverty and refuse. Just tolerable enough for Wikus to maintain a degree of normalcy in a life that had veered far off the path of normalcy. Where every passing day carried him further from his own memory.

Wikus closed his eyes and opened them to the mirror across the room.

A gold eye and a blue eye stared back, blinking in the glass. Both iris were the same size now, but they remained frustratingly mismatched. Terrifyingly identifiable.

Humans commented on it. Other poleepkwa commented on it. They'd never seen someone who looked quite like him. Or who sounded quite like him. A couple of the PMC had been fascinated by his overall strangeness during the eviction, but they rarely had time to linger. He’d signed the eviction paperwork happily, perhaps too happily, and that was that. Two hundreds kilometres out. No harassment, no escalation, no spur of the moment execution. Even the drive was uneventful. The other people in the truck were silent, staring restlessly at their feet or out the windows. Wikus stared listlessly as the road curled away and the city retreated. He felt nothing. Not even despair.

The identification papers he’d stolen that week were now stashed in a mason jar, gathering dust in a lopsided cupboard that he rarely opened. It needed work. The description didn't quite fit. Fortunately MNU agents tended not to look at documentation too closely, unless they needed a secondary reason to detain someone, and of course he knew the exploitation of that better than just about anyone.

_I’ll die here_, he told his reflection. _I’ll starve here before I ever see her again_.

Tania. Equal of the sun.

Half of the clutter riddling his home was on account of Tania. Flowers and butterflies dangled beside the ceiling light. He had books littered with drawings so awful he cringed to see them. And awful writing, some of it trying to explain to her what had happened that he had hoped to bribe someone into delivering. Six months ago he'd learned how to create a type of musical pipe from Shepherd, who lived in the same row as him, and several prototypes still lurked here and there. Most of the successful attempts had found other homes because Shepherd played the pipe and her friend played a djembe and sometimes they were joined by others and their music and laughter could be heard from down the road.

Wikus laughed at this because it was at heart extraterrestrial technology, which was illegal to produce and to possess. Hidden among the joyful beat of the djembe though, this small wooden instrument was no different from something human. It was like a little autonomy, a quiet resistance, Shepherd told him. Playing it made her feel more free than anything.

And he felt the same making it.

He liked creating things, changing them. It consumed most of his time, the time that would have been sacrificed to his old employer had Wikus not weaseled his way out of being drawn into what amounted to forced labour. A thorough education into how MNU operated and any regulations relevant to the people of Sanctuary Dark didn't hurt. All of it information that he gleefully slipped to whoever might be in earshot, provided they weren't human.

Among his inadequate letters to Tania he'd spent an inordinate amount of this free time transcribing English into the poleepkwas' language in the interest of spite, accessibility and, more importantly, the threat of starvation unemployment presented.

He really had picked the worst possible career. At least he was among familiar company, a dark little voice hissed. They'd all picked the wrong career.

And all of this was far more manageable than his current pursuit.

Well, he could try to craft a larger needle. He might never have the same level of motor function he had in his own body, and besides yarn and string were easier to come by.

The door blew open with a bang, and the needle slipped, slicing right into his hand.

“Ow!” Wikus sucked on the wound, glaring at the figure skulking in his doorway. “Amber, you fucking scared me. I’m trying to thread this.”

“Oh,” the other poleepkwa said, voice high and lilting, sharing traces of the same shrillness Oliver’s had. Amber crossed the room and, towering over him, carelessly took the needle away.

They slipped the thread through the tiny eye as if it was the easiest thing in the world, not the hour long affair that began as soon as the sun had settled beneath the horizon.

“What’re you making?”

“More clothes, I think. Fletcher asked.”

“Oh. You make me some, sometime? Nothing fits me here. Humans are so tiny, even smaller than you.”

His palpi twitched at the unnecessary commentary. “Okay.”

“I’ll bring you things to eat. Promise, Sky.”

“It’s fine.”

“Shepherd could use some help fixing something, too.”

“Okay,” he said hesitantly. His neighbours asked him this a lot, and it also kept the starvation at bay.

Sometimes things were easy.

“Can I bring it?”

“I don't even know what it is.”

Then other times things were equivalent, in Wikus' opinion, to neurology. Those things didn't always need to be complicated. They just needed to be beyond his ability. And so many things were.

“I might not know what it is,” he continued. “Tell her I will come to her tomorrow. Then if I know how to do it I can show her how to do it.”

And that was the trouble with Sanctuary Dark. The sheer amount of knowledge and literacy the nonhumans of Earth had lost was staggering. Because of his current undertaking, Wikus had amassed a surprising amount of their writing and this joined the rest of the clutter; dog eared and yellow paged books, scribbled papers, occasionally a computer tablet that like just about everything seemed controlled biologically. People brought it to him when they knew he could read it. He'd never been especially interested in higher education, nor needed to be. But even basic education seemed insurmountably valuable in the district. Making others more self-sufficient naturally followed. Also, it removed some internal burden.

Sometimes he really would rather melt into the ground and disappear entirely. He supposed the regular interruptions kept him grounded in the present, distracted from other thoughts. The _call of the void_, only far louder and far more persistent. The intrusive thought was always lingering when he left the shack to walk or get water, that he could antagonize a PMC at any time. Didn't even have to touch them.

But Wikus also wanted to rob MNU of the opportunity to murder him, and sometimes even that spite was enough to lift him out of the black despair.

“Can you help me read? It’s human gibberish.”

“Okay,” he said. Amber shuffled closer, showing Wikus a crumpled newspaper clutched in two hands. It was folded to a page that spoke of a riot in Pretoria, where a lot of poleepkwa held work permits. Wikus winced at the snippets he glanced between Amber's fingers.

“You still making things for that human girl?” Amber asked, attention wavering around the shack.

Did the kid want a translation or not? Wikus shook them off, snatching the paper away.

“She won’t see them. The city is too far now. But it’s better I left 9 quickly.”

Probably he sounded absolutely demented to Amber, who knew him only by the name his neighbours had given him and not as Wikus, to think that a human girl was anything other than creepy and repulsive and unnervingly gelatinous. Wikus remembered choking and shaking with laughter the first time he’d heard of humans described that way. He’d planned to tease Tania about cannibalism the next time he saw her with a bowl of jelly. He’d still been glowing with optimism back then, in the nights after he’d left her the flower. Boosted by the fortuitous journey.

That had been a long time ago now.

“You love her?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you worry she wants to be with her own people?”

“No,” he said calmly, carelessly, catching his reflection in the mirror once more. “Never.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I miiiight be wrong but I am 99% sure that the ridiculously!adorable appendages on their mouths are palpi like on a spider.
> 
> Giving Wikus a name was absolute agony, but I did want to reference the heterochromia because he doesn't name himself. So basically all my poleepkwa names would just be whatever the word is translated to in their own language. I dunno how you'd say Amber in poleepkwa but whatever that is, probably 'slfkhksfhfkshforghapsshg'.
> 
> I just don't know how to translate clicking into a latin alphabet without losing my mind, though MonsterInDaBerth does it excellently. And on that note, go read their fic, my friends. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It's what got me on the Wikstopher boat curse theeeem in the best way possible.
> 
> Welp, that's chapter one for you. You got this far. Bless your bones. Happy Halloween.  
Good luck to all you Nanowrimo folk.


	2. Under Control

“Dad?”

“Tania?”

“Dad, help,” she whispered into the phone. “Please help me. I'm scared, Dad, I don't know if anyone is outside.”

She paused, taking a rattling breath.

“There's no windows in the kitchen. They threw a brick into the glass and said they’d rape me. They said it would be to teach me a lesson.”

“Where are you?”

“In my bedroom with the wardrobes against the door.”

There was a silence. The call disconnected. Tania squeezed her eyes shut. She could call emergency services. She should call them. But what if they didn’t care? What if no one came or they said it was just another harmless prank and she was being stupid, being dramatic for attention? What if she made too much noise and it caused the people outside to escalate? To actually enter the house for the first time?

“Your mother's called the police,” he said suddenly. “Stay on the phone with her. Stay in your room until we arrive.”

“Why is this happening to me, I haven't done anything!”

“It's okay.”

“It’s not.”

“It's going to be fine. I'm putting Mum on now.”

“Tania? Tania, are you okay?” Her mother sounded distant, her high bird voice far away. Tania's words froze in her throat. She couldn’t cry, she couldn’t breath. The phone tumbled across the carpet and her mother’s attempt at comforting her faded off to nothing but an incoherent murmur.

The sirens came first, harbingers of her father's people and then the colourful aura of police lights cut through the drawn curtains and the duvet that engulfed her. Tania didn't move. Downstairs she heard the front door open, and even with the light show, Tania couldn't bring herself to stand let alone push an oak wardrobe brimming with clothes aside. How could she even bear the humiliation of someone telling her to relax because it was just another cruel joke?

The sun had set a lifetime ago and in the dark, battling insomnia, she'd pulled the sofa near the front door and finally dozed off listening to the chirp of crickets and the occasional passing of cars. The initial bang hardly roused her. She startled half awake as if summoned from a dream. Then came another, more powerful crash as a rock exploded the window and skated noisily through a cluster of dirty teacups.

Dazed but with panic thick in her chest, Tania rocketed out of bed and crept to the kitchen, ducking flying glass when the last two windows crashed over her. She waited until the howls of laughter grew faint before daring to slink through the dark, squinting beneath moonlight and the soft glow of a street lamp. Glass shifted under her bare feet and sliced into her skin. Then without thinking, as soon as it seemed words were scribbled on two bricks, she mechanically flicked on the lights and crouched to read them.

When another crash boomed out in the night – distantly she realized it might be the car – Tania fled up the stairs.

Now she huddled against the bed, listening to several sets of voices calling her name, asking if she was alright, if she was safe. It seemed so asinine. She felt suspended between states, both safe and unsafe, the duvet over her head like a child's pillow fort.

“I am,” she squeaked. And ended the phone call.

Her father reached the door first, rapping softly.

“Sweetheart, can you let us in?”

“No.”

Getting up was monumental, facing another human unimaginable, she couldn’t bear to answer more questions. Every day had become nothing but unending questions from hundreds of people and sometimes there was refuge and sometimes there were assholes throwing bricks at her in the dead of night. If something were to strip away the anxiety and panic, Tania might have felt anger at her situation. But powerful emotions took powerful energy, something that she was depleted of. When she finally did build up the stamina to greet the world beyond her bedroom, Tania's mother slipped through the narrow gap in the door to embrace her and they sat together on the bed.

Her head rested in her mother's lap, tears soaking through denim, with her mother's fingers tangled in her hair, stroking her as if she were five and waking from a harmless nightmare. Tania's breathing didn't slow. All she could hear was the explosion over and over. Her mother began to pick fragments of glass from her hair and they tinged as she flicked them into a decorative plate.

“I haven't done anything,” Tania croaked. “I didn't choose this.”

“I know, sweetie,” her mother said before gently leaning Tania upright to examine her bleeding feet.

With some encouragement they followed a trail of red footprints into the living room, her mother eyeing the oddly placed sofa before pulling two chairs together. As Tania feared, no sooner did an officer see her he approached to start a conversation, just casual at first, asking how she felt, if she thought she needed medical attention, but Tania refused to even look at him and her father stepped in, insisting she could clarify in the morning. Of course, Tania had no interest or intention of clarifying at any time of day. She’d ignore their calls the way she ignored everyone else.

An eternity passed, waiting for the light show to fade and the police to depart. With permission to finally enter the kitchen her mother began to pull tea from the shelf and milk from the fridge leaving Tania alone with her father. An awkward silence hung heavy between them until her mother chimed in, lightheartedly.

“Are you living off just canned soup and take away? You have to eat more than that.”

“I like canned soup,” Tania said, though really it was a lie. The soup was terrible and awfully salty. After the first month of it she’d experimented with every possible concoction of flavours in order to abate some boredom, sometimes with success and sometimes by guiltily pouring it down the drain and slinking out to a midnight pub.

The soup concealed her other activities. Her mortgage came out of the joint account her mother had opened for her, as did the rest of her bills. The majority of her private life she paid for by withdrawing extra cash from grocery markets when she bought, well, an unreasonable amount of reasonably priced cans of soup. So if she had to sustain herself by stomaching liquid salt to maintain an iota of control she did so nauseous yet determined.

The kettle clattered on the stove, making Tania flinch.

“Is my car intact this time?”

“A side window is damaged, that’s all,” her father said.

Tania cursed herself. Really she felt _that_ detail was her own stupidity and laziness. She should have parked it in the garage, but she’d been tired and impatient and just wanted to fade away. Over a year had passed since any incident and she’d slipped into complacency.

Her mother handed her a steaming mug soon after the kettle whistled like a demented air horn. Disinterested, Tania shuffled it to a side table.

“You should spend tonight with us,” her mother said, sitting beside her again and placing a hand on Tania's knee, a stark contrast to Piet who didn’t touch her or come too close. In the past he might have embraced her with a steady arm. Tonight he avoided her. Not out of dislike or disapproval. He simply feared a resurgence of his daughter’s aggressive rejection. “I can get some of your clothes together. You could sleep in my room and we can just use the guest room or-”

“I don’t want to leave my house alone.”

The suggestion brought Tania down, clarified some of her thoughts, drew out a frustration with her mother that had been festering for months.

“Sweetie, this kind of thing is why we talked about selling.”

The thrust of their disagreement was Tania’s chosen haven, or lack there of. Every time her mother pushed, Tania forced herself to suppress as much frustration as she could lest it bubble into contempt. The familiarity alleviated the animal panic that was thundering in her head. Her mother’s pressure was concrete, and nagging, and rife with emotion without danger.

“Some bored, asshole teenager will find me where ever I go, unless you would like me to get plastic surgery and move to another country.”

“No, I don't want that. Please, just stay with me tonight. There is no reason for you to keep living here.”

“Except that it’s my home,” Tania said.

She knew what else her mother held back saying, probably thinking she was too fragile to hear it tonight. And maybe she was. Next time it might be a bullet. Next time it might not be children playing a prank. Next time the threat might be serious how it had occasionally been in the past, where some rowdy, probably drunk, nuts used her parked car as target practice at two in the morning. Or like the afternoon strangers chased her off of a bus only after it had started merging, forcing her to wonder retrospectively if the only thing that saved her being killed by oncoming traffic was the bus driver’s unwillingness to lose his job.

But what scared Tania most wasn’t these various gruesome scenarios her mother imagined or her apathy about her own future. It was that she knew that apathy would evaporate as soon as it was happening, while someone attacked her, so why couldn’t she bring herself to care beforehand and prevent it? To leave instead of passively tolerating it?

“I'm going to have someone watch here tonight, then,” her father said.

“No.”

“Don't be stupid about this,” he warned, like pressing him would lead to consequences more unpleasant than yelling, though she couldn’t imagine what those consequences might be. The distance between them had grown so cavernous that sometimes Tania felt like she was a stranger, a guest in her father’s life.

Economically beholden to her parents, disagreements were awkward. She knew they would never leave her with nothing or forcibly take her home. It just lingered as an anxious thought, that they might hold their aid over her head, criticize her as ungrateful though Tania wasn’t sure if what she felt was gratitude or simply relief anyway.

“I don't want people watching my house. It’s _my_ house. I need some water.”

Tania pulled away from that delicate touch on her knee, to return to the cool and quiet darkness of her bedroom, staining the carpet with every step and shuffling into the bathroom. Maybe she could go, she reasoned, gripping the sink for support. It was night time, she could sleep, she didn’t need to heavily interact with them until morning. Then what about the morning? More questions, she told herself. They'll just keep asking questions. They’ll pressure you to talk to police, to see a doctor. She'd been examined by so many medical professionals in the past year, without much say in the matter, that the thought of going to a hospital made her sick to her stomach. She’d sooner choose to hack a limb off than step into any environment reeking of rubbing alcohol and sterility.

Tap water was soothing on her swollen eyes, and washing her face she cleaned up the excess water with a towel before sitting on the edge of the bath to rinse her feet too. The police could stay, she decided, watching the tub turn pink. Not the people from MNU. That would be her compromise.

Tania paused at the top of the stairs, concealed on the first landing, socks softening her footsteps and protecting the carpets. The whispery voices of her parents seemed to travel up, as if eager to be overheard and she strained to listen in.

“She doesn't know what she wants. She'll look back and understand why this is best,” he said.

“She _just_ started talking to you again. Don't betray her trust like that. Just help me convince her to start thinking straight and stay with us. _Please_, Piet. This is getting out of control.”

“She's still in love with that mewling little shit, of course she's not thinking straight.”

“I don't think she is. Not anymore.”

“It's so obvious she might as well be wearing a sign,” he said, glancing at the sofa.

_Of course __it was that_, Tania thought, annoyed.

“A police officer can stay,” she announced as she descended into the living room. Her mother flinched. “But I am going to stay here. I'd really like to go back to bed now.”

“Why don’t we stay as well?”

“Mum, I just really need to be away from people and there's police.”

“We’ll come by first thing in the morning,” she said, straining. “First thing.”

“Alright.”

“Just keep the tv off tomorrow, okay?”

“I never turn it on anymore,” Tania said, and it was true. Normal television and films couldn’t hold her attention for more than a few minutes and the news was so consistently obsessed with the depressing that neither offered escapism and she got along fine without weather updates more significant than a glance out the window.

“Call us if something happens. And call emergency services first, _please_.”

Her mother kissed her cheek, her father squeezed her hand, Tania smiled at them weakly, the door closed with a soft click, and she retreated to her room, heaving the wardrobe back against the door.

Alone on the floor, her head resting on the side of the bed and with spite she had only began feeling in the past year, Tania decided to await the morning news. And why not? A vicious voice in her said tomorrow would be nothing short of a spectacle if her mother were warning her off.

It would be why to strangers Tania was suddenly interesting again. It had probably been building for awhile.

What that pivoted around, well she knew exactly the answer. Dimly, she recalled the date, what was drawing to a close at last. Because no matter what there was to say about D9, it always circled back.

Tania remembered the brief time when she still followed what was going on in the days the eviction had drawn to a close, when UIO and other organizations published the estimated casualties, only a fraction of which were human. The news presented it as less than half a percent, which was a very sanitized way to say approximately seven thousand people.

Some politicians suggested this was a gross overestimate that had included unrelated deaths which happened to take place during the operation. Her father said it was propaganda and UIO needed to get their heads of their asses. He said it politely and with tact, but the sentiment was clear enough. All of that information her mother had been forced to relay. Tania had never been quite sure her parents' motivation for sharing that information, except perhaps to halt any visualizations of her father as more of a villain than she’d felt at the time. Of what relevance was it? Tania just wanted to forget the whole thing.

Yet at six in the morning as the sun climbed the horizon, she committed herself to flipping through news channels. To witnessing the last vestige of the slum being erased.

By seven am, broadcasters, protesters, tourists, and interested onlookers gathered en masse on the side of the road as bulldozers tore into the Unity Gates. Tania watched it feeling hollow and aimless. Only a small curiosity at what might be the mood of the artist who had designed the vast steel sculpture now toppling off the concrete wall that had quarantined District 9 from the rest of the city.

Out of habit she continued flipping channels. Every news outlet cut in and out of the live footage. Behind the drone of the latest interviewee and their own self-involved opinions on the nonhumans' presence, Tania could hear the grunt and bluster of machinery. The live feed and the shouting would change shortly, as it always did. She stared at the ceiling, listening and waiting. She didn't need to watch what was coming, she had seen it. Like having your dirty laundry aired on a world stage.

“Wikus was always making me things,” she heard her own voice say. She didn't look, simply rolled off the bed as her past self prattled in the background, saw a woman she barely recognized as she passed the mirror by the door, and left the house in a daze.

For a moment, chill air on her face and damp pavement cooling bare feet, a wave of relief and peace followed Tania into the silence. A moment that made the world feel whole, and solid, and real again.

Glaring white under the pink glow of a morning sky, fuzzy, wobbly lines marred the pavement, sprawled across the driveway like grave mould. She stood among them like a weed struggling to thrive between the thinnest fracture.

_DEAD PEOPLE LIVE HERE_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> r i p tania. life improves. 
> 
> i waffled so hard on what the bricks would say before settling. death threats just don’t scream misogyny. that’s the warned for reference i mentioned in the A/N. 
> 
> oh yeah and if you have watched the film recently you might recognize some of tania’s dialogue came from someone else. particularly her first lines. :D god that would be uncomfortable for piet but I LOVE PARALLELS 
> 
> also thank you to the tumblr user who described wikus as a mewling little shit cause it couldn’t be more true.


	3. Eclipsing

“I'm not afraid of you!”

No one answered as Tania’s voice echoed into the quiet dawn, but then she didn’t expect them to. She was alone, like she always was, and the only people she might disturb were her neighbours, probably long gone to work or fixated on radio broadcast. So Tania glared at the coming sun until tears pricked in her eyes and the glow became overwhelming.

“Are you okay, Ms Smit?”

Tania flinched, blinking confused after images away. A short woman with a kindly face and a slightly strained expression had burst from a patrol car lingering across the street.

“Why is this here?” Tania asked, trying not to escalate to hysteria, shivering and suddenly aware that she was only wearing a thin night shirt. “Why didn't you see it painted?”

“This happened last night,” she said. “It’ll be removed some time today.”

Tania’s hands began to shake.

Why couldn’t people just go away? Why couldn’t they just leave her alone?

She wished she could scream at the sky until her throat ached, until night returned and some new stranger made themselves known. But she didn’t need to wait, did she? She could just step onto a bus, try to stay on it long enough to reach the ruins of District 9, face the people there instead. They might not even recognize her, she thought, haunted by the woman in her mirror.

Buses wouldn’t be running in the suburb immediately and that was no problem to Tania. The route she needed was a fifteen minute walk away. She’d probably only have to stand around an extra five. Walking would even warm her up. In the cool morning air she crossed her arms to fight the chill.

“You really should go back inside,” the woman said. “Ms Tania, you don't even have shoes on.”

“I don't need them.”

Then she saw him, out of the corner of her eye, lingering about half a block away and watching the scene with amused interest. His presence effectively trapped her in the cul-de-sac her home occupied, robbing her of any opportunity to avoid her parents’ surveillance or hold onto any shimmer of privacy.

“For your protection”, her mother would say, as she always said. To watch other people, not to watch Tania herself or report on her activities, though her mother tended to have inhuman and otherworldly insight into Tania’s life. That’s what mothers were like though. Knowing their children so intimately they were nearly telepathic. It was just paranoia. Her family wasn’t the enemy. But this man certainly was.

Pulled by a flare of anger and hatred, Tania turned her back on the officer gently encouraging her to stay, and approached the man as he leaned carelessly against an unmarked vehicle. He was armed, and uniformed, and she wanted to slap his smirk right off his face.

He was a contracted murderer. Of seven thousand people? A terrorist? Did it matter when one way or another the mercenary’s purpose was to keep her under control, in whatever manner he preferred? A man who would probably murder her if she were any other woman in the world, one with no connection to the Managing Director of MNU. Tania didn’t have illusions about the First Reaction Battalion’s mood towards her. Of course, was she really so different when she wanted to do the same to them, if she had an iota of power? The thought only fueled her anger, and she could feel a pressure under her skin, an inescapable call to action. Any action. Tania’s foot struck a stone and she picked it up, then whipped it straight at the man’s shorn head.

“I knew he would have you here. His little pets,” she growled. “Go back to the rock you crawled out from under.”

“Go home, Tania,” he said, watching the stone roll off the hood of his car like it was no more harmful than a raindrop. 

“Try and make me, you absolute garbage.”

“Just go home.”

“Then shoot me because I have no intention to listen to you.”

He caught the second stone, and it bounced on the pavement as he advanced on her.

“I won't shoot you. I wouldn't waste a bullet on something as cheap as you, but I will drag you back there by your hair if you don't get moving on your own. Incredible that you haven't been institutionalized.”

“Hope you enjoy this," she laughed. “You'll be out of a job tomorrow.”

Shrugging, he folded his arms. “Doubt it.”

“Get off my street.”

“You'll just turn back anyway.”

“What-” She felt suddenly light headed, stomach twisting, face burning. 

“You always do.”

“You're... watching me? You're watching my house!” The admission startled her. It was one thing for him to be obvious and present during a crisis. Even in the first days she never saw MNU creeping down the road, or hiding about. The times she'd stumbled on them they'd always made themselves known, which she’d found uncomfortable enough. They didn’t make any efforts to conceal their presence and that had always been the point. To scare strangers off, and if they happened to gossip to her father about Tania’s midnight pub crawls that was just a side effect. But that was a year behind her. How far were they following her? Just on small errands or to halfway outside the city? And what was he sharing with other people? 

“Are you sure you didn't smash those windows yourself?” he mocked.

“Why would-”

“You seem to like attention is all I'm saying.”

“Just... just leave me alone!”

“Go home, Van der Merwe.”

“_That is not my name!_”

“Tania,” the officer said gently from behind. “I can get your shoes, and you can get dressed properly, and if you still want to go somewhere I can take you and you'll be safe, have someone with you.”

It took some of the fire out of her, the first stranger to show her any kindness in longer than Tania could even remember, and it froze her. Like she'd been dazed by headlights, every thought seemed to tumble out of her mind.

“Sure you want that in your front seat? She might grab the wheel out of your hand. Might wanna cuff her first.”

And then like nothing, it flared again. “_Fuck you_.”

But the woman pulled Tania aside so that she was facing the mercenary directly and they began a heated argument in Xhosa, and though she could understand every increasingly condescending word they said to one another Tania took it to mean she was no longer included. Maybe it was best. She knew she shouldn't let them antagonize her and if she could just listen to her conscience's softer, calmer voice...

“I told you,” Piet said, rolling the window of a black car. “She hasn't moved on at all.”

“Stop this nonsense!” her mother shouted, door slamming. She pried the last stone out of her daughter’s hand. “I told you not to watch the news today and you refused to listen. Get in the car, Tania.”

The shouting suddenly stopped, everyone turning towards Tania, and her mother whose face was twisted into a snarl. She had eyes only for her daughter. A part of Tania burned with embarrassment, like she was just a petulant child. Another couldn’t detach itself from the hatred she had for this man.

“Better listen to mummy,” the mercenary said, and when Tania whipped around again her mother had already secured a grip on Tania’s shoulder and stuffed her daughter into the backseat, shutting the door in her face. After an indiscernible exchange, her father returned and started the car, staring silently at the road while her mother leaned around the front passenger seat.

“Why are you so determined to destroy your life?”

Tania blinked, incredulous. “Destroy _my_ life! What, by _existing_? By going outside!”

“Going outside isn’t the problem,” her mother said. “Going outside hardly dressed and running off God knows where is.”

“This is defining my life! I'm still in my thirties! And I have lost everyone and everything because of him. And because of _you,_” she snapped at her father, who said nothing.

“You are letting it define your life by refusing to let go.” Still was a sliver of empathy in her voice, as they meandered through the suburb, house after little house drifting by. “Where were you going?”

“You know already.”

“Then tell me what you would gain by walking to Unity Gate and we will bring you. But if you’re just doing it to hurt yourself even more then we're just going home.”

“I’m not doing anything to hurt myself!”

“Then what are you doing? That man was doing his job and you think it is acceptable to assault him?”

“By spying on me?” Tania laughed, derisive and refusing to mask her disbelief. “That’s his job?”

“His job is to make sure you’re safe.”

“How do you know he didn’t smash my windows up? If he’s always around then he should have seen who did it.”

Her mother scoffed, patience fading. “You’re being paranoid again.”

“No one has been watching the house for months,” her father said. “Obviously that was the wrong decision.”

“I want closure,” Tania said, though really she wasn’t even sure why she’d walked out the front door. “I want to see it destroyed so I can move on and the city can move on.”

“It’s broadcasting live.”

“That’s not the same,” Tania muttered.

“Why isn’t it the same?”

“I don’t know!”

Her anger burnt out, and slow creeping exhaustion took its place.

“You’ll just be harassed,” her mother said with finality, turning away to gaze out the windshield.

“Then just let me go home,” she whispered. “I’ll do what you want. I can’t be this person anymore.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is called… Back to Joburg… and that’s all I'll say. :D
> 
> But... I do art for almost everything.   



	4. Interlude I

** The End of the End Code [English Transcription] **

December 27th, 2011

The communication system colloquially named the End Code was decrypted by private contractors, on behalf of South African government, at the end of November.

It is with regret that we write to you, that the Non-Human Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Non-Human Settlement Act of 1982, and the regulations placed upon Sanctuary Dark are facing reform. This is never in our favour. Media reports that the timing of these proposed changes are coincidental to the loss of the End Code. They think we are too naive and too simpleminded to see through this lie.

Though we have no formal representation, this is our home and our land.

We urge you not to let the world turn their backs on us. We will be mass printing letters and providing the names and addresses of members of the Senate and the National Assembly. We urge you to fill mail boxes, to gossip casually where a human might overhear, slip messages where ever you can so that the humans might stumble upon it. Add your own voices. Remind them of our personhood. In this, the human public is not our enemy.

Canna, the Voice of the Nameless, has passed. But we are her legacy.

Compassion was the path that carried her. We can only hope that compassion is the path the humans of our country will choose to walk. But they cannot walk it if they cannot see it, if they cannot see us.

Yours faithfully, The Last Voices of the Nameless

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kinda wanted to do something like this and then discovering AO3 work skins kinda sealed it.
> 
> These won't be chronological. Just little windows into the world and the avvisi that poleepkwa are publishing, some of which are handwritten and some of which Wikus is transcribing.
> 
> And yeah that image is the actual alphabet so I am a rather invested in this fic being kinda Too Darn Much an artistic endeavour.


	5. Back to Joburg

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the inspiration. :D

“Did you seriously just cover yourself in fucking glowstick fluid!”

“Maybe.”

Wikus groaned. Resisting the urge to knock his head into a wall, he leaned against the little tent’s entrance, having come to talk about the morning. “When we're supposed to be going into the city tomorrow!”

“Looks great, doesn’t it!” Shepherd said, and she spun in a circle, her windmilling arms nearly knocking Fletcher to the ground. Her deep brown carapace, looking black in the poor light, was lit by beads of erratically spilled colour, like she were beneath a twirling mirror ball. Her eyes were wrinkled in glee while her palms were coated in blended patterns of luminescence.

Shepherd’s single room home hadn’t been spared her enthusiasm. The remains of more than two dozen mysteriously acquired glowsticks softly lit the floor and their contents covered as much the canvas walls as they did her. Only Fletcher, sitting on the bed, was miraculously untouched despite being present for the entire escapade. Yet if Wikus had walked in only a minute earlier, he probably would have gotten sprayed as well given the state of the stair runner that served as her door.

“You insisted on coming!” he snapped. Sometimes she could be so thoughtless and he found himself shaking the package he carried at her. “Do I need to paint the public access regulations on your face for you to remember them!”

“Yes, please!” she trilled, handing Wikus an intact glowstick. “In this, obviously.”

He could have stabbed her with it.

“We should start a night club,” Shepherd continued, gesturing so emphatically he and Fletcher recoiled from her. “It'll be the first. We can name it after the angry jello. Majorca Now Unnecessary. Get it? MNU?”

“I hate you so fucking much right now,” he said. “That stuff glows for almost two days.”

“That’s fantastic!” she said, wide eyed.

Wikus groaned again, eyes rolling. How bright would it be in the soft light of a library or archive he wasn’t sure, but it only took one error to have them permanently barred from entering small capacity spaces. Even if it was something as asinine as this, something a human would never be pestered over. For God’s sake, sometimes they had to disguise even birth marking, lest they be harassed over ‘unnatural decoration’. So body paint was out, strange clothing was out, just about anything remotely unique or defining was out, including MNU’s difficult to remove head tags which while illegal to remove, everyone borrowed spare gasoline and did it anyway. And the most frustrating thing was she knew it! Just like she knew it was unwise to argue with the people trying to keep you away from their ‘fine establishments’; all you could do was avoid as many exemptions as possible. It was a discussion they'd had two hundred times. Wikus knew these regulations like the back of his scaly hand, Fletcher knew them. But even without them, people were never prepared for a prawn quite as human as he could be, and if he had been given two skills in this life, they were far more relevant now. Shepherd on the other hand didn’t have the same fortune (or misfortune, depending how morbid you felt at any given moment).

“You’re the one who wanted to come!” he finally said as the silence stretched on and she snapped another glowstick. “I'll go alone,” he said, annoyed, but he didn’t like the thought of travelling on a bus alone, or wandering the streets of a sprawling city without company no matter how familiar those streets were. Frankly it scared him. Even the thought of passing the check points by himself made Wikus feel especially nauseous.

“No, you damn well won’t,” Shepherd snapped, snatching the glowstick back.

“Here’s your skirt,” he said, and tossed the bundle of cloth he'd brought at her which tangled around her arms. “If you get glowstick on it I'll kill you.”

Shepherd shook it out, examining his work, a mass of orange and black patterned fabric. Her demeanour softened, though she continued to eye the final intact glowstick with antsy machinations. “You’ve gotten really good at this, you know? It’s not even noticeably altered.”

Shaking his hand at her in dismissal he turned to leave, and Shepherd slid across the room, plopping herself down on the carpet, blocking the door panel.

“Hey, cheer up, they never let me in anyway,” she laughed. “I'm just too radiant.”

“Nah, you're just too arrogant,” Fletcher said, leaning back onto her palms. A downright serene individual, she spoke more softly but always with warmth and good humour.

“Hey, if you had to choose between me and the angry jello who would win? Don't ask shrimpy over here, we all know his answer.”

“Haha, ‘shrimpy’,” Fletcher said, smiling. Wikus glared.

“The angry jello, _obviously. _I don't think I could stand looking at you my whole life.”

Shepherd stared at her, mouth open, wide eyed.

“You've _corrupted_ her!”

Feigning offense, Fletcher threw her arms up. “What! They look better than they taste is all I'm saying.”

Wikus’ antennae immediately snapped against his skull. “Please don’t remind me.”

“If you’re starving you'd try it.”

But his eyes met Shepherd’s, equally uncomfortable.

“Guess I'll die,” they said together.

As ever, Fletcher was unfazed, lighthearted, as if she was discussing a love of snow and not a morally questionable diet. “They’re just talking animals. How's it different than a cow? A cow that talks.”

“Please stop,” Wikus said.

“You know you’re going to get arrested if you keep sharing that story,” Shepherd said.

“The opportunity presented itself.” She leaned casually back into the canvas wall, craning her neck to muse at the light speckled ceiling. “I didn’t go out and kill someone. Hey, they eat us you know.”

“Oh my _God_, you say that every time! You're gonna give shrimpy an aneurysm.”

“Don't call me a shrimp! Go look in a mirror!”

“What are you, American? I'm a cricket monster, shrimpy,” Shepherd said, jabbing playfully at his knees.

“Hmm, good point. So I'll see you tomorrow if you haven't drowned yourself in hydrogen peroxide,” Wikus said, and squeezing around her he slipped through the door panel the canvas flapping against Shepherd’s back.

“What is that supposed to mean!” She turned to Fletcher, alarmed. “What the hell is hydrogen peroxide? Why did he say it so ominous?”

“It's what's lighting up your house right now. You know you should pick up a chemistry textbook once and a while.”

“From _where_, exactly?”

Fletcher laughed. “A library.”

“I hate you so fucking much right now.”

***

Shepherd woke him early enough in the morning to remind Wikus she was still more luminescent than a Christmas tree, lifting him away from the shadows of concrete walls, endless metal doors, and unseen apparitions. Dark places, best left untraveled, but he found the emotion that came along easy to push away once she began rambling. Stretching achy joints, Wikus sat up.

Though she'd hidden most of her unnatural bioluminescence beneath a shawl and floor length skirt, he knew Shepherd still wasn't compliant with public access requirements and would blend in less easily, but had no interest in arguing with her. Universally, Shepherd managed to get herself removed from almost any space she attempted inhabit anyway, whether in the outside world or within the district. She could be too rambunctious, and flamboyant, and uncomfortably loud for a species whose vocalizations weren’t especially loud to begin with.

Really a nightclub would be the best place for her.

Still bleary, Wikus opened the mason jar hiding his stolen identification with the continued hope no one read too carefully, and placed it along with Shepherd's in a small book bag. Then he dressed, pulling a knit sweater over his head and stepping into denim pants that were baggy in all the wrong places, but that was the trouble with human clothes. Wikus at least had an easier time finding things, being so much smaller. The effect was intact though; from a distance they looked almost human, and that was the point.

Everything was to combat just another method lawmakers tried to slip in to bar poleepkwa from entering human businesses. By that same token Wikus had to admit it made some sense. Humans were beholden to similar rules. You couldn’t stroll into a library without proper clothes on and expect people to tolerate you. So it was a very difficult point to contend, because really it hinged more on the accessibility of resources more than anything else.

They fell in step with one another in the grey haze of dawn, Shepherd soon kicking a stone back and forth and expertly keeping it from disappearing into the litter that cluttered the road. Sometimes, giggling in a series of quick chirps, she’d try to pass it to Wikus and he’d immediately lose it on the first kick, sending the stone right off the road. She’d find a new one, she did every time, and he lost it every other time. Coordination was definitely a weakness.

“We really need better transit here,” she said, sending the stone and a soda can flying. Shepherd stretched, then folded her arms behind her neck. “I hate walking across the district every time I need to go to work. Maybe that can be beside my entertainment district. Buses or something. Nothing fancy.”

She nudged another can with her foot, a cat grinning on the crumpled paper cover. “Hah, look at that garbage. You know Pandora got his hands on powered taurine? They sell it for cats. Some kind of raw food trend started in Europe or America or something and then here we are eating fucking corn and dying of vitamin... whatever it is, you know the word, not having enough... vitamins.”

Wikus covered his mouth, trying not to laugh.

“Whatever! Stop looking at me like that. He’s obsessed with everything American. Tried to convince me working lumber over there’s better than anything here. Fucking nut. You know they don’t have regulations there? That’s what I’ve heard. He could get chopped in half by a saw. Totally legal. Then they leave you in the trees for wolves to eat you. Just watch, he’ll go at that again today. Never turns down an opportunity to babble about it. Tell him Canada’s better, I dare you, it’ll make the ride go by faster. Makes him so mad. Cause they’ve got no regulations either but it's more public. They’ll just let a tree fall on you. _And_ I heard some kid got trampled by those giant deer thingys. I got safety equipment here! Know what’s great? So we’re supposed to be using the names the angry jello gave us, right? But we can’t say them. So what happens if they ask me what my name is?”

“You hand them your papers?” he said.

“No, I make you!” She watched him hopefully.

“_Jonathon Hepburn,” _he choked in English.

“Don’t know how you do it.”

“With pain and contempt,” he said as she clapped joyfully. And a background with phonology certainly helped.

“I’ve always wondered what it means.”

“No idea, but it’s the same last name as an actress from old films. You’d probably enjoy them, actually.”

“Doubt it. I’d be interested in seeing films though. Thousands of kilometres across the universe and our parents couldn’t be bothered to bring entertainment. No wonder they got lost, eh? Probably were dying of boredom and then stopped here, stupidly, idiotically. Not that _I_ mind being here.”

Soon they crossed onto a more readily used street, a packed gravel road that winter rains tried to wash away, made treacherous by the deep ruts man-powered carts had created through mud. Under the heavy afternoon showers they ran like fierce little rivers.

One of the more affluent parts of Sanctuary Dark, they were passing the homes of craftspeople and street vendors who had operated well enough in District 9 and reestablished themselves readily here. Some of the more fortunate ones even exported their wares to the rest of the country for exorbitant prices, courtesy of a human-run business who marketed poleepkwa crafts to foreign tourists.

Of course, affluence was a matter of context but it wasn’t the only such community that had cropped up over the past year and a half. Several others had in various parts of the improvised city. This was the second largest and still it was dwarfed considerably by the more populated and developed North End. It was nothing like the rest of the country, but they were becoming similar to the other human shantytowns.

The phenomena the markets represented, reminded him of shock he felt towards how fast the district had escaped its roots as a concentration camp, straining against the boundaries of a tent city, like it was impossible to contain. Those first six months had been a stomach churning, overpowering terror. Everyone uncertain. The Old People whispering stories not just about genocide here but of violence back home. That their own species and their own people were capable of the same cruelty brought the severity of what they faced down to a mortal level, took it and turned it into something more real, something they could describe to their children more personally. So while Wikus had his own understanding and anxieties about unofficial and off the books intentions, the poleepkwa collectively shared another private understanding.

It was months of something inexplicably overwhelming. What frightened him most when looking back was that it only took a few small changes for fate to have gone in a devastating direction. Not because of predetermined plans, simply the nature of MNU and First Reaction Battalion’s descendants, the people who now policed the district. Maybe the aid workers leaving earlier than they did; they stayed for over six months rather than one. Maybe the mass lay offs people feared which would have cut them off entirely from the outside world; that never came to pass. Successful suppression of outside media was impossible while the aid workers remained. The threat of detainment for any humans who followed the poleepkwa out for one reason or another, often adopted family, sometimes business people, sometimes opportunists, was never followed through on. So many intentions that for one reason or another were overlooked or dropped had allowed everything that woke this morning to thrive.

Then regardless of the confusion as the aid workers departed, almost out of spite the economy had exploded in its own, unchecked way. A strange economy, that hobbled along without organization. It still didn’t cut through the poverty; it allowed people to thrive. While sometimes the mercenaries and sentries extracted unreasonable bribes from businesses, no one seemed too bothered by it. Just another operating cost. Sometimes. With working alone being an entirely alien concept to poleepkwa, collecting those illegal taxes could prove troublesome for humans facing three or more bothered and surly business folk. They did much better at the checkpoints, those being the real seat of human power, and a catalyst to several past riots.

Yet life trundled on.

He sometimes wondered why Shepherd didn’t join others creating her tiny pipes, when she hated humans so much, but the munitions plant paid better and she enjoyed compiling gossip material with her coworkers.

Shepherd stopped kicking the rock lest she hit something. Activity rose with the dawn, and people stirred inside their houses, the scent of cooking lifting into the air. Still set up from the day before were were small tables and stalls. Mats and rugs would clog the road and then be buried under bowls and baskets holding a colourful assortment of meat, fruits, scavenged and re-purposed technology, tools, pottery, cooking utensils. Almost anything a modest person desired could be found in some capacity. On the far side of the market one merchant sold and traded a limited selection of building materials, though the best place for that was to visit the recycling facility in the North End.

Wikus liked the market because beyond reminding him of home it was one of the most well maintained streets, largely free of the trash, vendors believing it would turn patrons off, opportunistic people reclaiming it, and occasionally discarding it down side roads out of sight and mind. So rather than anything unpleasant, the air was always laden with the flavours of frying oil and grilled meat, people had the spirit to laugh openly, idle chatter overwhelmed the senses. You could disappear in a crowd like that and forget yourself.

Still quiet and eerie, with the soft clatter of waking merchants, Wikus and Shepherd could pass through without the risk of tripping on someone’s set up. Unfortunately the same could be said for the poleepkwa mercenaries who were beginning their patrols. Wikus shuffled closer to his friend. Armed with regular firearms, dressed in light armour, they could be easily spotted by the white stamps on their heads designating their positions and white arms bands carrying their formal identification, easily avoided from distance. One was hovering around the edge of the market where the shuttle would stop to collect passengers and a couple groups of people had already gathered, each pretending to ignore one another, occasionally passing sign language between themselves. Someone began a cheerful conversation with the mercenary.

Watching the others, Wikus knew he and Shepherd not dressed like normal poleepkwa, but Hazel and their friends, who Wikus could recognize from previous trips, went to the cities only for pleasure and not for purpose. They didn’t need to as be generically human or blend in quite as seamlessly. He wished he could be the same, if he had skill enough to be a craftsperson or confidence enough to find work in the North End.

“Hey, would you be mad if I clowned on some teenage brats again?” Shepherd asked. Human teenagers, she meant, who she loved to harass at the first opportunity if they came inside the district; an incredibly rare occurrence since moving, it had once been a common past time for her. Outside was a different story.

“Do it on your own time.”

“You’re right, probably better not to- _why hello!” _she said sidestepping the mercenary who suddenly cut across their path. “And a good day to you, my fine sir.”

She pulled Wikus closer, skipping ahead. “Walk faster, mate, he looks kinda bored.”

The mercenary didn’t follow, and relief washed over them.

She growled quietly as they passed beyond hearing range. “Fucking prawns. All the privilege in the world and I wouldn’t become a tagling.”

“There are films,” Wikus chirped. “We could probably find-”

“That’s nice. Really what’s their problem? You’re obsessed with walking jello but you’re not running around kissing their asses. How does a person hate themselves that much? They’re probably not even treated better, I bet that’s a rumour. They’re just sick in the head.”

“No, they're treated very well.” He cringed, feeling the frustration emanating off her like smoke, and pulled on her arm to stop her veering away from the shuttle stop.

“Not well enough,” she said, eyes rolling. “I'd rip his antennae off, I swear, they're just so gross. If they wanna be like traitors, I'm happy to help.”

“Do you want the whole world to hear you!”

“Yes, actually! Someone should say it!” she snapped, voice rising. “I should tell him right now.”

“They’ll just beat you, _let's go_.”

“I guess. I mean, _I'd_ be fine,” she said, raising her arm so that he was momentarily lifted off his feet. “Not so sure about you, shrimpy.”

She climbed into the shuttle without another word about it, greeting her friends and mulling over her options. Probably she would be fine. Shepherd was unusually hardy and larger than most people to begin with and taglings didn’t have authorization to use lethal force. But she wasn’t immune to everything. And he certainly couldn’t handle being kicked in the head quite as readily.

Twenty minutes later, the sun now well above the horizon, they were there. The South Western Checkpoint and the Wall.

Without fail the drive from Sanctuary Dark to Johannesburg lasted approximately two hours of idle chatter and awkward silences. The informal limits of the once tent city where little sheep and cattle farms had spilled beyond the original fencing peeled away, a few farmers tending their animals in the distance. Wikus watched the drabber landscape pass by, trying not to be jittery, and Shepherd caught up with acquaintances she'd collected in the past or made new ones. The driver worked for UIO and didn’t bring security so by and large it was always a more relaxed environment than labour transit tended to be. Of course naturally people bonded with their coworkers, but they saved the complaints and shit talk for more comfortable hours.

Eyes closed, antennae tapping the windows whenever the bus rattled over a pothole, Wikus rested his forehead on the glass.

He never experienced a rush of joy seeing the city come into view, just churning anxiety he was making a mistake and an unpleasant sensation that he categorized as grief and pushed down, cordoning it to a part of his mind he could address later. Or never.

This particular library was unpleasantly close to his home, assuming it was still his home and so Tania was still present within it. It was also one of the few libraries he knew well enough to find things needed with speed and he recognized most of the librarians. Though of course they couldn’t return the favour and perhaps that was for the better. He’d accidentally maimed a couple of books in the past and awkwardly asked Tania to return them because he knew the librarians wouldn’t yell in her face or berate her and she got along with them quite well. Tania was the sort who could insert herself into most groups seamlessly and carelessly. She had once been spontaneously invited to another commuter’s New Years celebration while taking the bus home from work. Wikus on the other hand found strangers more uncomfortable, and would be happy to nibble at the food table like an estranged, lost relative.

Smiling, he looked up at Shepherd, doing much the same thing. Perhaps that was why he so readily got along with her (most of the time), although they just happened to be neighbours and Shepherd was always gearing for up a fight with someone.

“Hey everyone! Shrimpy’s awake! Don’t brush him off too quickly. He’s hilarious. Speak human for them, shrimpy.”

“No,” Wikus said, turning back to the window.

“You’re no fun!”

“Don’t call me a shrimp!”

“They’re gonna think I’m a liar!”

“_Fuckin’ prawns_,” he said.

“There it is!”

“Happy now?”

“That sounded painful,” Hazel said, wincing.

“He’s fine,” Shepherd drawled, and she waved Wikus off. “Does it all the time.”

“Crazy.”

“Doesn’t Pandora usually come on these trips?”

“Hurt his arm at work.”

“Oh. Sucks, mate. Are they really hiring sorters or is that just a rumour?”

“Nah, it’s happening. They’re expanding, you should jump ship. Nicer to work for your own people, eh? Can actually talk in a group without _chordata_ shouting your head off.”

Wikus returned his attention to the landscape as conversation drifted towards work. He didn’t like drawing attention to his aversion towards formal employment. Shepherd had always been very interested in the recycling facility, it had cropped up six months ago, operating largely independent of human interference, despite being heavily monitored. Of the few functioning cameras remaining in the district, probably the bulk of them were looking in on the activities of the North End. It seemed the most likely place to spark a revolt of some kind, which at the moment made it the least likely, if the avvisi were anything to go by.

While Shepherd prattled on, Wikus thought of how his own conversation should go once they made their way to the library in Meadowhill. He’d written some down but conversations could go astray. As much as he wanted to avoid his old neighbourhood, beyond the familiarity required, he’d developed a reputation with the staff that stripped away some of the suspicion other people might face. So if he needed to transcribe reference material regarding electrical repair, something that some assholes might think made him a terrorist, that was the safest place to go. In other locales he had to rely on how amiable the staff on duty happened to be, though he'd collected feedback about that from various other people, and with help had even compiled a rough idea of librarians' schedules. Not that it was needed much anymore.

His visits with Shepherd hadn’t started for personal gain. They’d started with the needs of the End Code, with their resistance's most ambitious and then most disastrous undertaking, a project that crippled them and Sanctuary Dark near beyond recovery.

And he hated thinking about that. Sometimes the memory just clutched around his lungs like a cold vise that refused to relax because it was so much more damage he had contributed to.

Everyday, more and more, there was no going back to Jo’burg. Not really.

He and Tania and the rest of his old life occupied two very different worlds, one in which he was alive and another in which he was not. Where he continued walking the most destructive path available, often without intending to.

Whether or not Christopher had been honest or justly opportunistic when he told Wikus poleepkwa medicine could undo the outright nightmare fuel he’d experienced, Wikus knew his future as a human had a small collection of possible outcomes, all unpleasant or even more nightmarish than the initial affair, and he was interested in none of them.

That understanding had settled into him repeatedly, where it would occur to him one day and then vanish again, as if he’d never thought about it to begin with. Another night of unwanted introspection would bring it up until eventually, over time, it seemed to solidify as a coherent and stable memory.

These sorts of trips lent themselves well to soul searching.

He hated to think of Tania alone, that maybe their last phone call, a conversation he could recall only with difficulty, had given her something to hold onto despite the news coverage of the violent shoot out. He hated to think that maybe leaving her a flower had been detrimental to her moving on with her life. Or that perhaps it had been done more for himself than for Tania. But Wikus couldn’t remember the reasons for half of what he’d done during that fateful, miserable winter. Only that he couldn’t shake off trouble.

If she moved on, if she remarried, it was irrelevant. It hurt to think about, and he walked away from those thoughts repeatedly, reminders that their marriage itself was somehow everything and nothing at the same time. Vows weren’t the defining spirit of a relationship. Losing Tania herself, who she was, was like losing a bit of himself, like his soul had fragmented irreparably. Maybe hers had too.

With his first return to Johannesburg forced by the Voices of the Nameless, there hadn’t been time to think about how close she’d been.

But sometimes rare parts of the distance between them felt like it had faded. It took experiencing nonhumanity, living it, being so fully invested in the lives of another species to see the utter sameness and maybe once he would have been unnerved, like watching a crowd milling about from above and being reminded of a disturbed ant nest. But a colony of workers, aimless alone, disorganized without guidance, with complete reliance on others, on friends and close relationships. The observations entertained by entomologists across the globe could then so easily be applied to humanity. It seemed more like the curse of all social species.

And it was everything. And it was nothing.

The Nameless were everything, and they were nothing.

“Who, what?” Wikus startled awake, rocking back and forth as Shepherd fiercely shook him.

“We’re here!” she chirped. “Adventure! Intrigue! Street food!”

The group disembarked from the shuttle as Wikus rubbed his eyes, the driver rattling off the usual perfunctory speech. A curfew remained in effect; return before seven or you may lose the privilege to come; don’t antagonize shop owners; show people respect; leave if they ask; try to maintain six metres from humans whenever possible; don’t enter restricted zones; and the usual lie (though Wikus wasn’t dumb enough to argue the point) Johannesburg by-laws take precedence over the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“You know, by-laws don’t _really_ over write- _ouch_!”

Shepherd yelped, shoving her face into Wikus' as the man prattled on. “You stepped on my foot!”

He hummed and pretended he couldn’t hear nor see her until their escort finished up his speech and waved them off. But the moment the bus rumbled to a start and pulled onto the road, Shepherd seized the back of Wikus’ sweater and swung him around to face her, eyes so narrowed her facial plates overlapped. Her antennae tapped irritability, and before he could pull away she flicked a pedipalp at his tentacles, and it stung like a rubber band snapped on bare skin.

“Ow!”

“You stomped my foot!”

“Stop causing trouble!”

“Next time I'll flick you in the eye.”

“I wouldn’t step on you if you kept your mouth shut.”

“God, they're at it again,” someone said from behind.

“Every time.”

“Shut it, Hazel,” Shepherd said.

Hazel laughed. “Shrimpy’s right, eh? You talk too much.”

“Don’t call me a shrimp! I'm not a shrimp!”

“So noisy,” said their friends, and chuckling they dispersed.

Shepherd smiled, waving farewell.

***

The city was as it always was. Sun bouncing warmth off faded pavement. Buildings rising far ahead. Slightly more orderly than home. So much more height to everything than the stubby shacks they’d become used to. Focused on their initial mission and respecting time limits, Shepherd and Wikus headed straight for Meadowhill, a three hour walk even with a wider gait. Afterwards they could enjoy the city itself, and Shepherd could irritate teenagers from afar by mimicking their actions like an otherworldly copy cat. Which he supposed was relatively harmless.

Meadowhill Library was once an old brick building, refurbished to look more upper class twenty years prior, and for that it reflected the small suburb's attitude quite well. Illusion. The double doors and two windows were pedimented, a squat monstrosity covered in ornamental moulding, cloaked by several large and very leafy trees. A handful of people could usually be found relaxing on the cool, shaded stairs. Today, they were mostly absent.

He still remembered Shepherd’s reaction the first time she’d seen it, forever classic, “My house is better.”

Unlike almost every building they passed, the one less obnoxious detail making the library stand out was its utter lack of signs barring nonhuman entry.

“Guess I'll just sit on the stairs,” Shepherd grumbled, waving the feathery tips of her shawl.

“Maybe do a lap around the block.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“But it’s loitering.”

“He’s doing it,” she said, chin pointing at the one man sprawled lazily on the steps, soaking in the sunlight and tapping his foot to an unheard beat. So involved in his own daydreams, he might be horrified to know he’d garnered the attention of almost three metres of muscle and scarcely contained belligerence. Exasperated, Shepherd began tapping her pipe.

“Can you just listen, this one time?”

“Don’t see why this is so critical when you don’t need to work on that Nameless shit anymore.”

Wikus felt his stomach drop.

“Be quiet! Just go!”

“Alright! Relax,” she said, blowing a note loud enough the sound vibrated between his antennae and she disappeared down a side street, a cheery, enlivened melody drawing curious gazes. The young man on the stairs shot up, wild eyes seeking the music, and found himself alone, the only evidence of company having disappeared.

A wall of cool air tingled on Wikus’ eyes as he entered the library, the softly shutting door sealing off the sun’s warmth. He blinked, waiting for the room to brighten, pleased that it was a quiet afternoon with the only occupants too involved on computers and or with their noses in books to notice anyone new. Even the librarian, back turned, stood behind a scanner swallowing document after document. Wikus pulled a folded strip of paper from a side pocket, opened it, and shuffled quietly to the counter. His note slid so readily across the polished granite, it nearly floated onto the head of a second librarian, slouched over a paperback, almost too engrossed to notice him. She skimmed the note and smiled, Wikus darting between aisles before he had to speak and the chirps and croaks and pops of a nonhuman voice could draw everyone’s attention.

“Psst, Ayanda! Look, I told you, every few weeks.”

“How does he return stuff?”

“Some aid worker. Amahle’s laid back about it. You know that janky windup bird? The little prawn made it for her.”

Ayanda. The woman’s voice sent a nervous shock through his heart. He’d deal with that in a minute, just wanting to enjoy a brief moment of sentimentalism.

Oh, yes. The aisles stretched out before him like the arms of an old friend. The air conditioning crisp, a faint scent of paper and adhesive, nothing that could overpower you, and everything so free of settled dust and sand. The tight pile of the carpet was unusually soft on the exposed soles of his feet, and his attention shot downward a moment. After all, he wore shoes with no soles, the rest was an easy to forget illusion that felt no different than the flutter of the hem of long pants. Real shoes were too difficult to make, too expensive to buy from the markets, and too rare to scavenge. He didn’t mind. The illusion was intact. Fletcher had been the one to solve the footwear problem early on; like barefoot sandals they meant to deceive.

He snagged on a precipice of want, now safely tucked away from prying eyes and in the comfort of nostalgia that was balking against grief and winning. Sorely tempted to make a brief detour to the other side, to shelves bearing books with colourful spines and imaginative covers. To a memory of reading children’s books together, while Tania daydreamed about kids, but also for the escapist joy found in vivid illustrations and uplifting adventures, free from the pessimism fiction churned on. She’d laugh at bemused criticism like their friends were the strange ones, not Tania and not Wikus, limiting themselves to one facet of storytelling. So some memories remained vivid, unshakable.

Then there was Ayanda, bringing him back to Earth. Tania’s school friend, studying linguistics while Tania busied herself with design. She might be curious. She might try to start a conversation.

For some reason her presence felt like a dangerous problem. Why that was, he couldn’t place it. Paranoia perhaps. After all, what could she do other than talk at him? Wikus never spoke to humans unless absolutely necessary. When they tried it was like his throat froze up. He couldn’t. Here, not a shred of the past had echoed in this present. Everything, even the most minute identifiable detail, how a person walked, how they carried themselves, everything blasted apart in a little more than seventy four hours.

But if her coworker told a story about a strange little prawn, who took home dictionaries of several languages every once and a while? If a peculiar, rather primitive cipher had been publicly cracked, the only real news out of District 10 in a year, and you could remember a Meadowhill kid whose life once focused on linguistics and then ten years later he’d disappeared suddenly?

Wikus tried to shake the thought off. That was insane, and half of his efforts were buried across Pretoria as well; it would have been stupid to pull resources out of one library. If he let it, this kind of anxiety would do nothing except grow unfettered into something ugly. Still, it made some decisions and knocked him to his senses. Better to be quick, as planned.

With no more bouts of nostalgia, Wikus found the section he needed - everyone always saying he knew the library better than he’d known his house- and flipped through the pages of several large tomes outlining electrical repair. What a nightmare request to transcribe, he thought, glaring at the illustrations. Delicately replacing all save one, he crept back to the counter, both librarians smiling conspiratorially. Whatever they wanted, it was like mites crawled under his carapace.

“We don’t bite,” one said. He recognized her. Emily. Ayanda on the other hand, why couldn’t she just focus on scanning papers? The closeness to home suddenly felt too much. God, when had she even started working here?

Being, probably, the only nonhuman to ever step into Meadowhill Library, Wikus didn’t need to do much more than give them the book and let them enter it into their system. He supposed the senior librarian was amused, or humouring her coworker, because when she’d finished she typing she said, “I extended the return date to four weeks instead of two. So you don’t need to worry.”

He almost chirped, pleased. Except maybe they wanted that, to trigger some kind of conversation and draw the interaction out. Even if he had any desire to speak, that kind of extra noise might finally alert other people, so he reigned in any emotion.

“Thank you,” he whispered, suddenly paranoid about his old accent, which of course he didn’t have; there was nothing human about him now. It was just a memory. Wikus cast nervous glances at the people hardly two metres away, waiting for her to put the book down again. She hesitated.

Why did today have to be so cursed!

He hated taking things from people's hands. That small action held too many possible complications. When she finally placed the book on the counter, Wikus slowly picked it up, thanking her again.

Finally he could leave, and shutting out their conversation hurried quietly away.

“Why is it so adorable!”

“Keep your voice down,” Ayanda hissed. “People gonna think you're crazy.”

“I can’t help it! Read this note it wrote me! It has a shrimp drawn on it, it’s adorable.”

If the cool air had been jarring the bath of sudden heat, on top of Shepherd tapping her foot and pacing angrily at the stop of the stairs, hit him like a train. The harmony of her pipe came to a grating halt. A pedestrian who’d been discreetly enjoying it chose to hurry on with their day.

“What the hell!” Shepherd asked, snatching the book away and turning it back to front. “Why are they so nice to you? I look just as respectable, if not more! And I speak better.”

“Your chelae are exposed, which is obscene.”

Supposedly.

“It's not obscene, it's comfortable! What if I need them?”

“For what?”

“Just what if!”

Yanking the book back, Wikus slipped it into the small bag he carried over his shoulder. It was just large enough to carry a book and their identification, because large bags might hide bombs, or weapons, or illicit drugs, or be the mark of a scavenging thief. Well, if you listened to popular media and alarmist fearmongering.

“Whatever,” she said. “Maybe a spaza shop will take pity on me. I really want some bread.”

“There’s that one food cart near the pick up location sometimes. _They_ were nice to you.”

“Oh yeah! Even better! Filled breads here I come!”

Thank God.

To an outside observer, Shepherd had a disdain for anything made with flour of any variety. Flour made up a significant portion of the ration, and nutritionally it was equivalent to feeding a polar bear nothing but corn. But if you threw that flour into oil, fried it, and stuffed it with anything she was drawn to it like a moth to light.

Outside, finally he could breathe again. They could go home. Impatient, Shepherd pulled him down the stairs with her.

But Ayanda’s appearance in the library was like a tooth ache he couldn’t stop worrying at.

For several blocks they would be barricaded between the cozy cafes and gentrified shops that fringed Meadowhill. Fenced in by the familiar. The crawling beneath his skin and the heat refused to lift away. Sometimes he'd catch sight of an acquaintance on lunch or an often visited barista bringing out lattes topped with dainty microfoam hearts. Every recognizable person was quickly becoming too much, standing out more than they usually did.

Trying to ignore them, they walked with purpose, never letting their gaze linger for too long on one person or shop. Wikus had become the master of this, seeing without blatantly looking or even appearing interested. Normally Shepherd did the same, but sometimes in stark contrast she’d hyperfocus, and she began to slow to a meander.

For someone who boasted she hated all things human, she could sure be enraptured by the trappings of the middle classes' everyday life.

“Imagine being able to eat out every day,” she said, eyes twinkling. “Literally just, imagine, meat filled bread every day.”

“They don’t.”

“Think it would be cool to see the Sterkfontein Caves sometime? Like the lake obviously, not the animal skeletons,” she mused as they passed a stationary and calendar shop. Wikus glanced at the landscape photos displayed upon them.

“Right,” he said, not meaning to sound condescending. He just needed to be further from home. “Aside from the shuttles not going anywhere near-”

“Pfft, I’ve walked further.”

“We would never be allowed within a kilometre of a World Heritage Site. Could you just focus on something sensible like bread?”

Before she could veer close enough to press her tentacles against the window, Wikus grabbed and squeezed the soft part of her wrist, one of the few places a major nerve was exposed, so she jerked back in surprise as if he'd hit a human’s funny bone.

“Shepherd. You’re going to scare them,” he said, pointing to the no entry sign, condescension turning into panic that she failed to detect. “Then they will call the police, which they have the right to do, and we don’t. _Please_, let's just leave.”

“Swear to God you were a pencil pushing tyrant in another life,” she growled, yanking her arm back. “You’re like the poster child of an annoying bureaucrat. You’re not a tagling so stop telling me what I can’t do.”

Her sudden anger pulled out his own.

“You would be banned from coming here so quickly if you were on your own,” he said and walked off at a brisk pace, which he knew would only piss her off more. At least she’d come.

“Right then maybe you _should_ be a tagling if I'm such a pain in the ass. You’re halfway there, prawn.”

“I’m n- you can’t just do whatever you want!” he said, still not looking at her. “And you know it!”

“I’m not an idiot,” she grated out through a half clenched jaw.

“Then why-”

Wikus stopped so abruptly that when Shepherd, still fuming, walked into him he nearly knocked them both off their feet and onto the hard asphalt.

Sun had caught in a flash of pale hair and she rested at a café table enjoying lunch on the other side of the two lane street, leaning forward with a posture Wikus would never forget, even if he lived another hundred years. Tania seemed startled, her brown eyes staring directly at him, like nothing else existed. She looked away as the man with her glanced over his shoulder for a bare second, just enough to understand what she'd noticed before returning his attention to his daughter.

Their attention was lost but he couldn’t move.

If he wanted to watch her, he couldn’t. Every shivering nerve of his body had focused on this man that he hated, more than anything, a loathing so deep it twisted around Wikus' soul. That hatred and anger was not the domineering feeling as Shepherd waved her hands, trying to regain lost attention, his forehead stinging for she pulled on his antennae with increasing force.

He forgot about his body. He forgot about the winter and the end of the nightmare. How today he was perfectly unrecognizable.

He was just Wikus again. Small and human and helplessly failing to cling onto autonomy.

He turned from his father-in-law and ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> D:  
r i p wikus... so close and yet so far.  
chordata, the phylum humans occupy. because if we can other poleepkwa they can other us too.


	6. Sunrise

Tania woke early again, stepping out of the shower and wiping fog from the mirror with her forearm. With the enthusiasm of a funerary procession she rubbed keratin into her hair, blow drying it so it set bone straight and with extra shine. She hid her exhaustion behind concealer and subtle makeup. From her closet she pulled out a light blue summer dress that hung around her ankles and sandals that matched, adjusting it when it snagged on her necklace. Her clothes still didn’t sit quite right, she’d lost too much weight on her ridiculous diet of soup, but she cinched the extra fabric with a belt and found herself relatively satisfied with the results.

“I will not be this person,” she said to herself again, grabbing keys and a travel mug of freshly brewed tea.

When she finally saw herself properly it was in the mirror by the coat rack and she looked far different than yesterday, yet she saw a stranger all the same.

Closing her eyes, Tania unlocked the door, and stepped into the sun.

The police had gone. The MNU guard was probably lurking somewhere unseen. She edged the car out of the garage, the front passenger window looking like it was rolled down to collect the summer air with the only evidence of its demise refracting light in the wheel well. Incredible, really, that they hadn't smashed up the headlights or the windshield. Likely someone startled them off. These night time visitors were often opportunists, scattering at the first sign of outside detection from neighbours. Not that her neighbours were particularly warm with her, their demeanour had turned quite icy. They still didn't want vandals on their street; they still didn't want to see Tania injured or dead.

Because she wanted to keep interaction as minimal as possible, Tania left her car in a parking garage almost a kilometre from Multi National United's headquarters. Damp and poorly lit, the cavern like atmosphere quiet, peaceful, free from the wash of humanity and the public eye and it made her smile, just briefly, to be out of the house and so thoroughly alone. She might not be for long though. Parked against a wall in an effort to conceal the missing window, she reminded herself to pick up some clear plastic, and duct tape, and carry on from there. No sense in fixing it. That wouldn’t fix the overarching problem.

Something would, eventually. Perhaps time, or perhaps she'd wake up without the looming shadow of apathy and do something about it. And today, she'd ride the uncommon momentum that allowed her to leave the house. So she closed the distance with her head down, her hair falling forward and concealing her face. 

It was another warm morning, the sky pleasantly clear, perfect for walking. She regretted the decision quickly though, worried if her feet had started bleeding again it might leak out of her sandals. Nothing to do about it now. The looming facades of skyscrapers already towered over her, and there was her destination, waiting exactly as it always had.

“That’s… great,” Tania muttered, foot glued to one shoe with sticky blood. It smeared red across the side, through the insubstantial bandage. “Stitches. I should have sucked it up and just gotten them.” Hobbling out of the way, Tania leaned against the marble-faced wall, blindly fished around the cluttered ecosystem that thrived in her purse and yanked out a wad of tissue to awkwardly stuff into her sandal, wiping what she could off the side. How many people really looked that hard at your feet anyway? She resolved not to limp. There would be no extra reason to stare at her today.

Folding the excess filthy tissue into a tidy square and returning it to its natural environment, Tania breathed in hard and pushed open the glass doors to MNU for the first time in a year.

The atrium was the spiritual antithesis of the parking garage. Everyone dressed up, every woman touched by at least a little eyeliner and shadow, often more, no one with anything less casual than a button up shirt save for a pair of contractors heading for the stairs with their roughed up overalls and tool belts. A gaggle of men passed by her wholeheartedly absorbed in their own conversation and out of habit Tania quickly looked away and stepped aside, always to be unobtrusive or, what she most hoped for, invisible. She’d once spent time musing on who behaved more abusively towards her, was there any delineation between men and women. Not really. Only young children seemed to be a reliable exception to the nastiness expressed by their parents. Of course those same children were too young to perceive what was going on anyway. At least they couldn’t recognize her and find another line to buy their groceries. Not that Tania could always complain. That kind of immaturity could make a soup themed excursion pleasantly brief.

Dozens of quiet conversations converged within the atrium to a practical thunder, a great debate about where to take lunch, who was driving home, schedules, incompetent managers, neurotic and irritating coworkers, and that one person who unwaveringly microwaved popcorn in the break rooms. There was always one. The unspoken rite of office work. Loud though it might be, Tania could still hear the uneven click and drag of her own footsteps. Wincing, she pushed her foot down until she fell into an even rhythm.

The multinational company entertained an obsession with soulless, modern aesthetic. Everything gleaming white and grey marble, all washed together by the sun striking through windows that carried themselves several stories high. So much glass and light countered the brisk cold emanating off the shining stone floor and blasting cooled air through distant ceiling vents. Wide, low steps led to several elevators, stairs concealed behind doors faced with white moulding.

Like many wealthier institutions (she was reminded unpleasantly of the newest wing from her old university) the atrium boasted a modern sculpture, the obnoxious, sort, a twisted series of wooden twirls thrusting out of the floor like seaweed, turning in on one another in what hinted at being orb-like in silhouette, if squinted at from a distance. Once the signature of the company had sat in that hallowed spot, a replica of the globe constructed of a simplified framework of steel slats. Just as devoid of personality as the rest. Seeing it always made Tania glad that she never took the easy route of seeking work here, cursed to see the same steps and same obnoxious statue both in her dreams and in her mornings. But things had changed; she had changed.

At least the replacement left more to the imagination. The seven continents perhaps? Hopefully there would be infinite time to explore that thought.

Tania made it to the reception counter without further incident. Behind one of two sleek computer monitors, a secretary tapped at the keys without vigour, probably bored with her job.

All the sunlight in the world and it still felt the opposite of inviting.

“I'm here to see Piet Smit,” Tania said, toneless.

“You have an appointment?” the woman asked, not glancing from the computer screen, wholly apathetic.

“With my father,” she said. “Yes.”

The secretary's head snapped up instantly and with watery shimmering eyes, she gawped at Tania in alarm.

“Miss Smit! Sorry, I just wasn't expecting you. I'll call him for you. Feel welcome to go up.” She glanced at her watch. “Office’s on the twenty seventh floor, I'm sure you remember. He might be in Alien Relations right now, there’s a big meeting if I remember correctly. Still the twentieth floor. How are you? It’s been so long, hasn’t it? Let me know if you need anything. I'll just give him a ring, shall I?”

“Thank you,” she said softly, a bit confused by the rapid fire with which the secretary spoke. She’d caught the critical details. For a bare second she considered staying until the receptionist confirmed her father’s location, but standing in one place made her antsy and Tania decided to go straight up. 

“Yes, yes, to see her father.” Tania heard the woman mutter into the phone. “Yes, she's already in the building. No, I don't think that's necessary.”

Tania was halfway across the atrium already succumbing to her own internal monologue when the crowd milling about collectively jumped, the secretary screaming into the phone, “Why would you say something so vile!”

The elevator chimed, Tania stepped in and slammed the button for the door to close so quick no one could have time to join her. So the twentieth seventh floor. Maybe she could wait at the door to his office if his own secretary was just as disinterested (or worse, tried to converse with her, the topic ranging from trivial to unpredictably aggressive) or maybe she could swallow both her pride and budding anxiety and stop on the twentieth, just in case. If she couldn’t do it now, when would she? She’d have to face all of them eventually. Breathing out, she slowly reached forward. Twenty. She’d stop there first. She was a person, she reminded herself. Not a headline, not myth. And maybe it was just the speed at which the elevator rose that churned her stomach and spread a prickling heat over her skin, and not the unpleasant prospect of facing Wikus' coworkers again, in a few seconds, as soon as the door sang out.

Twentieth Floor.

She exhaled. There was no one on the other side when the elevator spat her out into the gloom of a miniature cubicle farm, to wade through improvised walls, photo copiers, and the people who she came to believe were soulless sycophantic vampires. That branding was the easiest way to reconcile their outright betrayal towards her. Though she knew she should portray herself as one of them, she couldn’t choke back that much pride or hatred. And oh how much hatred she harboured for these people.

And maybe if she walked quickly through no one would look up from their work, they’d just see the fluttering of a blue fabric and think it was somebody else. Had she worn this particular dress around them before?

“Is that...”  
Or, maybe that pipe dream vanished in an instant.

Then there were soft voices cut off as she passed, and there were heads popping up over the grey panels that formed their miserable work spaces. Some were new faces, most were not. Feeling their stares, the way they itched to say something but dared not do it, their whispering resumed in her wake. She could see her father’s head bobbing through the half open blinds of a window wall. Like a scarcely seen ghost rising from folklore, Tania glided by. Even if they had hated him, what had she done? Even in the first days, before the fucking documentary. It was her husband who was dead, wasn’t it? She was the one people ought to show an iota of empathy for. And if not empathy then sympathy. They’d been her friends too, hadn’t they? 

She wheeled on them as soon as she gripped the handle of the main office, not bothering to knock, white knuckled. Her gaze shifting over each of them, daring them to antagonize her. And they looked away quickly, guiltily. No one would do it, no one would risk Piet's wrath. She knew, and so did they.

“Oh! It's the monster fucker's wife,” a woman chimed, happily, and Tania whipped around. Sitting on the director’s desk, legs dangling and kicking, the woman wore bright red platforms and black pants rolled up to her knees. She was young and pretty and it took Tania aback, like she'd walked in on her father's mistress, but the woman had an ear piece Tania could hear someone muttering from on another line.

“I am not his wife.”

“That's why you're wearing your wedding ring around your neck?”

Tania’s hand reflexively twitched up, but she stopped herself from feeling for the chain mid-motion. The woman smirked.

“You know, your foot’s bleeding.”

“If you have no meetings, I was hoping you'd have lunch with me,” she told her father as he turned towards her with the third person inhabiting the room, a diminutive man who excused himself without another word, passing Tania silently. 

“Nothing pertinent,” Piet said. “Goodbye, Cecilia.”

The woman smiled again. “I needed to finish this phone call anyway. Mind if I baby sit Louis’ desk awhile?”

“I'm locking the door.”

“Oh, fine.” She hopped down. “No, sorry, Andrew, I wasn't speaking to you, I was speaking to Mrs van der Merwe.”

Piet typed in the lock code, having to usher the distracted, almost flaky woman out.

When Cecilia was gone and they were safely in the elevator Tania felt for the necklace, if it had fallen out of her dress. It wasn’t there. Just the hint of a silver chain tucked snugly away, then she looked at her foot. It was fine, really, exactly as before. Just the hints of blood she’d missed.

When they returned to the atrium people finally noticed. Piet was like a silent guardian when other people recognized who was passing. A formidable man, although about as drab as the architecture, for he had dressed in his typical grey suit, today with a matching pale grey tie. But he walked with a confidence that was difficult to fully ignore. For the most part his employees said nothing and awkwardly averted their eyes, although a few gave the managing director a brief greeting. He wouldn’t recognize many of them. To her understanding the building itself employed about five hundred workers. 

Though he was resistant to the idea, commenting on Cecilia’s observations, Tania insisted they walk to the underground parking and eat somewhere familiar. She didn’t want to wait for someone to fetch the car or linger around any longer than necessary and the one suburb where people often ignored her or icily tolerated her was the one closest to home, with people who she'd known at least a decade. It might have been safe to go somewhere new with her father but she was paranoid about cooks doing worse than spit in her food, even with one of the most powerful men in the country escorting her. Besides, it was a short drive.

The cafe they chose she’d been to many times before, and was busy when they arrived. Seats were readily available on the patio and being in the open air felt less oppressive and it was less likely strangers would creep away before their own food arrived which would be unfair to the restaurant. Though perhaps Tania was just being paranoid again, no longer able to discern the motivations of others, she was forced to admit some of her anxieties were probably simple misinterpretation. 

Tania’s spirits lifted when one of the young women who didn’t cringe away or make faces greeted her. 

“How are you, Tania?” But her voice was sorrowful, her brown eyes gentle with pity. “It’s been awhile.”

“I’m okay,” Tania said. The barista fetched them water. Tania ordered a salad she could eat quickly, her father a sandwich. 

They chatted idly for awhile, prattling about nothing more interesting than upcoming events or holidays she'd missed and extended family who'd asked about her and had tried to call. The family cat had taken to catching mice and leaving them on the kitchen counter. A new bookstore had opened in her parents' neighbourhood, that her mother would like to show her. She wanted to ask how some of her aunts were, they'd been relatively close, and stopped herself. Since Piet hadn't mentioned some of them among the rest, perhaps they didn't wish to be a part of family gatherings at the moment.

The barista popped out one more time with fresh drinks, jarring Tania back to her original purpose.

“No one will hire me,” she said, as soon as they were alone. No one else had yet to embrace the shaded patio. “People whisper like I can't hear them.”

“We told you not to do that interview.”

“I know,” she said. Retrospectively, letting that film crew into her house had been the worst decision of her still young life, exacerbating an already simmering problem that once might have become more manageable or blown over faster. Did she regret it from that angle? She wasn’t always sure. After all, many people had still been awful in the six months before it. But her family’s opinions were far stronger than her own. The documentary wasn't the root of all the evils in her life; for them that stretched further back, to a much earlier choice ten years ago.

“You're lucky they depicted you as a faithful wife who was a victim of tragedy rather then some kind of-”

“Pervert?” said a newly familiar voice from behind.

Piet's expression hardened. Exasperated he kept his gaze on Tania and the pedestrians, not turning to look at this short woman with an obvious habit for irritating people. 

“Are you following me, Miss Venter?”

“You told me to respond ASAP,” she said, flicking her bangs off her cheeks.

“By phone. Perhaps you have one.”

“Yes, but then I wouldn't get to properly say hello to your beautiful daughter,” Cecilia said, leaning over the back of Piet's chair, blue eyes twinkling, her sideways smile sloping off her face, her chin almost resting on his shoulder. He looked increasingly annoyed, like she was a continued thorn in the side of his company. And nothing about her suggested she worked for him; not even an ID card hanging off the typical lanyard. Perhaps she carried it in her pockets with everything else. She’d brought no bag, as if she’d made a last minute, unprepared decision to shadow them. Now she lingered like she was waiting for the invitation to sit down. Tania hoped she wouldn’t; she wanted to say what she'd been dwelling on all night before exhaustion gave her a chance to change her mind.

“Looks delicious,” Cecilia said as their meals were brought.

“You've said hello. You can leave now,” he said.  
Cecilia shrugged, as if to say 'your loss', playfully clicked her heels and disappeared seamlessly into the lunchtime rush, but not before blowing a kiss towards the barista who shook her head, laughing while returning to the cafe. 

“Venter?” Tania hissed. “Sadist Venter? That mercenary whose mother glared daggers at me? Your invitation was a poor judgment, by the way.”

“His sister,” her father said without much interest.

“She wasn't at the funeral.”

“She wouldn't be. They got on long enough to get him a job and that was all.”

“I wonder if she feels bad.”

“She doesn't,” he said, clearly preferring to drop the topic. Before Tania could ask what her job was he’d moved on. “I'm glad you're making an effort to leave the house.”

“I'm tired of hiding, Dad. This is, maybe a lot to ask.” She closed her eyes, stopped stirring her salad in anxious circles. It was now, or never. “Could I work at MNU? Could you help me?”

“Your mother and I said we'd support you indefinitely, Tania. I really don't think-”

“There were advertisements for data checkers. It's a big company. _Please_, I need to be independent again. I just want people to see me as normal, as myself, not some caricature occasionally appearing in the news. That'll never happen if I keep hiding.”

Silence stretched between them, so much so that Tania felt the opportunity slipping away. Of course he'd say no. She pushed her salad around on her plate. It might not even be on account of her health that he'd disagree either; maybe the blatant nepotism was uncomfortable and that was something she couldn’t argue.

“Someone would have to pick you up from the house.”

“I can drive,” Tania said, surprised.

“I don't want you in the underground parking alone. If any PMC speak with you, I want you to tell me immediately. Not at the end of the day or after the interaction. Call me immediately.”

There was almost a touch of anger, maybe hatred, in the way he said it that made her skin crawl. Underground parking though, she could admit that made sense. If he knew she’d made use of a parking garage this afternoon he'd probably insist on some kind of escort. Well, that was fine, maybe her mother could drive her, since the woman craved more interaction than an occasional...

Tania froze.

Two aliens had paused across the street, only for a breath, and from the distance she could almost mistake them for humans, except one of them, a bright orange skirt flowing over her feet and a shawl draped lazily on her shoulders stood two full heads taller than any human would despite her hunched posture. Their antennae waved fluidly, back and forth as if moved by ghostly wind.

“Why are they still allowed here?” she asked, annoyed. “Wasn’t the whole point that we lived separately?”

“They can’t be barred out, that would be a rights violation. Otherwise, some are still employed here,” her father said calmly, taking a small bite of sandwich. Unlike many people, he didn’t see the nonhumans' employment to be akin to foreigners taking jobs from citizens (although both groups were met coldly by the general public). To Piet it was a kind of opportunity that never sat quite well with Tania, uncomfortable with the way he would describe the roles they filled. They were employed often (though certainly not always) in positions 'unfit for humans' (many which humans could do without trouble, and safely, if treated responsibly), and yet somehow in and of itself it always sounded like a polite way of saying relatively expendable. And so they rarely discussed the going ons of the company together. Not that Tania had much interest to begin with. She’d even went as far to ignore the occasional scandals MNU was subjected to. 

If she was honest with herself, especially a year and a half ago, she wanted nothing to do with the nonhumans either, and was happy they were being made to leave the city.

But they could talk, and write, and her whole life the imaginings of old science fiction writers inexplicably sat motionless in the sky above them, like a metal cloud casting a ceaseless shadow. A floating metropolis humans were unable to recreate. Though she’d never say it (especially now, where such an opinion would only ruin her more), she couldn’t bring herself to believe they should be an exception, should be stripped of personhood.

They just needed to leave.

“They wear clothes a lot more than they ever show on the news,” she said. It was quite a pretty shawl, actually, which somehow struck her as odd. Just unexpected. “I never really thought about it until the documentary.”

“Because they’re animals, Tania. Most of them are hardly more self aware than a dog.”

So said, it was time for a topic change. 

“Why are you so worried about the opinions of mercenaries?”

“They have their own culture to worry about,” he said, leaving her to wonder what that might mean. They were just normal men, after all, albeit with a few psychopathic exceptions. “Just let them do their jobs. You can start Tuesday, I think. I'll talk with the department head.”

“Thank you,” she said absently. She thought she’d spotted the pair across the road a second time, glancing over her shoulder, but there was nothing save the rumble of traffic and average pedestrians.

“Are you sure you have the stamina for this?”

“For what, checking if numbers match?” she asked lightly, cutting across before he could elaborate. “I should go. I think the time on my car might run out soon. Thank you, Dad. I'm sorry for how much trouble I caused you.”

“We love you, Tania. It was never any trouble.”

Brushing away his renewed protests she shouldn’t walk, she smiled weakly, then hooking her bag in the crook of her arm so it couldn’t swing and be snatched, let her hair fall forward like a veil and began the long walk back. It briefly crossed her mind to try and find the two prawns again, she had questions, little imaginings that sometimes drifted through her head. She let the impulse fade. Besides, they could walk too quickly, and who knew what their dispositions would be like? They could be awful.

Two hours, and just as before, she regretted the choice to walk again.

At home, feet stinging like mad, she could see the windows were still boarded, the fuzzy white writing still stained the driveway and she wasn’t sure she could be bothered to look up what might strip paint off brick. What more could lines on the ground do to her, after all? Maybe they'd even ward future vandals off to not bother. Weary, she hopped out of the car to open the garage door, grabbing her travel mug as she did to take a final sip of a now cold beverage.

No tea. Not a drop. And a sudden panic bloomed in her chest. Leaving the car running with the door wide open she fumbled for her keys, shaking, turned the lock, and was blasted by a keening whistle that sang all through the house.

Skidding across the kitchen Tania knocked the kettle off the stove, the metal basin burning the tips of her fingers, sending scalding water into a small aloe plant.

Turning off the burner, she shuffled to the sink and ran cool water over her finger tips. And then dimly remembered the car still running.

“Maybe I really am going crazy,” she told the water as it swirled away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And things start looking up for our heroes! I swear. Burnt fingers aside.
> 
> In the meantime, baby Fletcher! ^^  

> 
> I hope she makes you smile with her cuteness! 
> 
> See you next time! <3


	7. Heading Home

“Ack, don’t run!” Shepherd snapped, and after several blocks of flight she snatched the back of his shirt. Though it was not a long chase, for poleepkwa could move very fast indeed, they’d covered enough ground to be well out of sight. “We’re gonna seem like a public menace. You're the one who wanted to come here all rules, rules, rules!”

But he pried her off, wordlessly slipping into the first available alleyway. 

Shepherd followed warily, hopping over garbage bins until they popped out on the other side, right into an old suburb free of traffic, for the moment seemingly uninhabited. Careful no one was watching from their windows and spotting an empty park thick with trees they found a bench to rest on and Wikus sat with his head in his lap studying a wisp of grass clinging to life in the hard packed earth. If only he could melt into it, be away from all of it.

“You gotta breathe slower,” Shepherd said, a concerned hand resting on the spines of his back. She blew air out her mouth, burring like a horse, thinking, for it was so easy for her to forget that he was more nervous than anyone she'd met, and more wary, and maybe even more human. Sometimes it unsettled her.

As his breathing refused to even out, and she began fidgeting, not knowing what more she could do, becoming frustrated by her inability to help or understand. It was just a city street, filled with animals they saw all the time. 

Of course it was impossible for her to know that the person curled up beside her was something else entirely. There might not be a soul in the world who could experience empathy in quite the right way, to understand the life of a chimera. 

After several minutes, he felt particularly stupid, though much calmer and mostly recovered.

They sat in silence a long time, Shepherd beginning to rip blades of grass into thin fibres she twisted idly together. Though she said nothing as the time passed, they both knew they needed to leave, and soon, to reach the shuttle in time. But it reminded him that she really was a genuine friend, for all their arguments, to risk being left behind. And Shepherd was right about their options. Running would make them a nuisance, it was not to be done, and the walk would be much slower. Though some city minibuses used to allow them, their presence in the city was quickly becoming unfamiliar enough that it wasn’t a reliable method of transit.

At a rumble of laughter, both their heads shot up, seeking the noise. A small herd of children. Shepherd hunched, to look smaller, her antennae sagging, though from the distance and between the trees they might be taken as twigs. 

They could just catch the end of some playground tale the kids were spinning for one another, and that was when they knew they’d miss the shuttles.  
Together they watched the children, a little weary, for this was not a neighbourhood where their detection would have a positive outcome. If a single kid noticed them, and called police, they really would have to run. 

“Wish that was us,” Shepherd said as the group soon passed around a corner, allowing them to relax. A brief reprieve, before a second wave appeared, this time kicking a ball between them. “God, now I really wish that was us.”

Curfew came before sun set, but unless they could sneak back into the business zone there was little to do except wait for darkness and mourn the loss of the spare light that could have been used to cover some ground. Later tracking down a ravine would be best, where housing was less developed, or the wilderness sometimes found between huge stretches of power lines. 

Wikus then cringed with the realization: their names wouldn’t be checked off the attendance list, and much worse not even at the check point. But maybe they hadn't been recorded anyway. The driver hadn’t bothered to stop to notify the guards of specifics this morning, Wikus had noticed before drifting off to sleep, more relaxed by the lack of interaction with people who operated at a low level of consistent rage. Probably better to find a new checkpoint to pass through in the future. He'd need to check schedules when they got back. 

“There’s no way we’re getting back, is there?”

“Nope!” Shepherd said with a small laugh. “That’s okay. I’ve been itching for an adventure. Why did you panic like that? You were being a little jerk and then you were just gone.”

“Just got a little startled.”

“You are a jumpy one. Did you recognize some of the jello people then?” she asked. “Not sure why two of them felt like tryna make eye contact. Maybe they were itching for a fight, like wild dogs or something. I’d win, but we know all of 'em are insane.” 

"I doubt they'd want to pick a fight with you," Wikus said. "She doesn't really like fighting."

“Wait was that her? The girl?”

He nodded.

“Then what’s the problem!”

“The people with her,” he said drawing little circles in the dust.

“You’re afraid of some frail dude? I mean, he's pretty ugly. Not much competition and you could just snap his arms off or something; that’s the best way to impress a potential mate in my opinion.”

“That’s her father.”

“Oh, so _no_ competition. Ohhhh, I get it, so this is a star crossed lovers thing and he's a bigot filled with murderous rage.”

“No, it’s a- it’s a thing.”

“He looked familiar but I can’t put my claw on how.”

“He’s been in the news,” Wikus said miserably, unable to stop her making the connection anyway, coming so close to the heart of the matter; he hoped her observations stopped short of the truth, stopped before she recognized the implication of who Tania was.

“Hmm, I think you’re right. Like I seen the news at work some- holy _fuck_ was that the angry jellos' employer? Wait, so that’s _my_ employer! He recognized you?”

“No. We were too far away.”

“Wait, wait, wait. So you did work for them!” A tangible mixture of victory and relief seemed to pass over her. Internally, Wikus glared. She'd probably had some kind of bet going on with Fletcher.

“I.. so do you,” he said quickly.

“Finally, things make sense!”

“What does?”

“Reading a million human languages, duh. What did you do?”

“Nothing. Lot’s of people can read.”

“What’s it like?" Shepherd asked, shuffling closer. "What goes on in there?”

“I don’t know,” he said, finally sitting up, deciding he needed to move the conversation elsewhere. “Should we start walking now? We can hide at the curfew.”

“Stop being stupid. Obviously you know. Shrimp like you’s not gonna last doing hard work like me. What’s the building like? You know, the one that got bombed.”

“We’ve walked by it before!” he said. And from a safe and comfortable distance, of course, Wikus had no intention of being within arm's reach of it.

“Inside!”

“It’s just a building."

“I just wonder what it’s like, you know, to be treated not like shit,” she mused.

He almost laughed. 

“You must have made one hell of a mistake,” she said.

Exasperated he nearly hopped up, but another gaggle of children appeared in the distance.

“How are we going to get home, Shepherd?” 

“Stop dodging everything I say!”

“Alright!" Wikus barked, throwing his arms up. "I worked for them. Jesus Christ.”

“Why are they so pissed off? If the leader of their little cult notices you, must have been pretty big.”

Shepherd dropped into her own thoughts and he knew she was piecing together their initial conversation, albeit very slowly while Wikus desperately tried to grasp at any straws wandering through his head. As always, few made themselves known, for he was struggling to remember contradictory things he may have said in the past. After all this time, he should have had a coherent way of describing his life. Yet everyone always asked questions in a slightly different manner, throwing him off. People knew something had happened, something significant and possibly even horrific. The details just ended there and he'd always have to make corrections to suggestions he disliked, that he feared would have poked holes in the little bits of stories he had told. But there were only so many ways to squirm away from direct questions without blatant lying. And then having to keep all those lies straight.

Her eyes opened to wide disks and she flicked her tentacles, a conniving sparkle in her eyes. “Ha! You didn’t sleep with her, did you?”

Wikus stared at her. If he was human, certainly his cheeks would be very red, instead he just listened to the roaring of blood throughout his body. That this topic would be as humiliatingly awful as it might be the other way around was a nothing short of horrible and he wanted to melt into the ground again. 

“You did!” 

Maybe that was the ideal conclusion. Less complicated, by far. 

“Pfft, you get mad at me for breaking little rules. There’s like nothing bigger than that. Except like, Fletcher, you know,” she said, mimicking taking a bit from a sandwich. “Or just murder, I guess. I’d ask what it’s like, but it’s super ick. What the hell were you even thinking? They’re like worms or something but with arms. Like you know when you step on a slug on the sidewalk and it kinda just leaks out the seams because they're just so squishy, like that, like if I stepped on one of them and they didn't just kinda pop I'd be surprised. Like slugs just less slimy.”

“Alright, I get it!” Wikus snapped. “Stop before you make yourself throw up.”

“So... what’s it like?”

“Are you seriously asking me that!”

“I’m curious! It’s morbidly fascinating! They look so breakable, don't they? Like you could accidentally squish them. And how does that even work anatomical-”

“Why does that matter! That’s not even the sum of a relationship! It’s just a thing some people do.”

Shepherd stretched again, arms behind her neck. “You’ll tell me eventually,” she said, confident but content with dropping it.

“Anyway, other stuff happened,” he admitted. 

“If I’d fucked the princess of MNU, I’d expect the consequences wouldn’t be that great.”

He smiled despite himself, because he supposed that was close to a piece of the truth. If Tania had never asked him to walk with her every time they stumbled on one another, or out to dinner, maybe Piet would have been a touch less murderous. Especially as Wikus suspected Piet had hoped he would be killed or otherwise ruined during the eviction process, where Wikus could admit he’d been leagues out of his depth. But that had always been a barrier for Tania’s father. Retrospectively he could recall the man trying to scare him off, unfortunately for Piet it was his daughter he needed to focus his efforts on, because she’d been the one to instigate the majority of their relationship, and then refused to budge at all.

Who really knew? That was its own situation. What was truly relevant was that if anyone else on the planet were to start turning into a prawn, they’d probably have the same unpleasant end as Wikus nearly did. Anyone except perhaps Tania. 

“I guess her weird status is why she never got arrested,” Shepherd said, and then she became concerned, her cheer fading. “What happened to you, it wasn’t like the tenements was it?”

Wikus started, surprised, because he thought Shepherd ought to know, having lived in the slum her entire life. He certainly knew more than the average soul, but that had been his job. The district had been Shepherd’s world. 

“I didn’t know there was anything like that in 9,” he said, doing a mental check of all the human activity he could remember.

“I dunno,” she said uncertainly. “Maybe there was. What happened to all the people who went missing? Before we moved?”

He had to admit, he wasn’t entirely sure, especially as comparing the number of people who were arrested or would go missing from District 9 to the bleak numbers of 10 was like putting a kid’s war game beside an actual war and daring to call them the same. 

He also didn’t believe the tenements really existed, rumoured to be disguised as one of the checkpoints (which checkpoint, no one ever clarified on, adding to the suspicion). where people were either tortured into giving false confessions or simply vanished. The rumours could be so appalling that it wasn’t difficult to feel some of the stories coming out of that place surpassed the scope of medical torture in sheer, unadulterated sadism. But all kinds of false stories circulated. He’d even reluctantly transcribed some of them.

And there was no evidence that such a horrible place had existed inside District 9 either. 

“I know detained people were taken to MNU in the casspirs. And they had another facility near police stations, but it was all heavily monitored.”

How they selected who was released and who carried on into the basement however Wikus would never know, and he didn’t want to burden Shepherd with that information. It spared her from a little more hurt. He had passed that on to very few people, under one great, extenuating circumstance.

“It wasn’t like the tenements,” he said finally, though really, what other valid comparison was there? Even if it were an urban legend, it was a descriptive one. 

When she told him she was glad though, Wikus suspected she thought there was more to it, but she uncharacteristically she chose not to pry. He took a breath, relieved that his particular identity hadn’t been addressed, and joined Shepherd into braiding blades of grass.

Eventually, she would probably find out. Hopefully it wouldn’t be from another encounter with old family.

If he thought back on the persistence of the heterochromia, that occasionally concerned Wikus far beyond a fear of recognition. If that was some peculiarity that was meaningless, or if he was still a chimera, still transient between two worlds. It might keep him alive, but he had yet to dwell too hard on how to possibly exploit that, because dying outright seemed preferable. He did have the occasional thought it meant maybe Christopher had been honest with him, and it always circled back to the impossibility of his situation. Living as a poleepkwa was preferable, because it was a life, almost a normal one, and not a nightmare.

He didn’t really know what Shepherd would do with knowing he was Wikus van der Merwe. Probably want to murder him. 

“I miss her in a way I can’t even describe,” he said to break up the tension, Shepherd eyeing his grass braids and comparing them with her own. “It’s her. It's not physical. It's just something present and constant.”

“I guess I can get that. What was her name?”

“Best left among the past."

Traffic began to pick up as commuters replaced the school children and they spent sometime in utter silence, afraid to make the slightest noise, soon ducking into a dense copse of bushes and tall flowing grasses while the landscape greyed out and the sun fell, its farewell summoning noisome insects. Once a couple with their dog wandered into the park and passed the bench where they’d taken respite, but well trained it had no interest in seeking out entertainment.

When dusk truly fled and all became quiet, they decided it was time to relocate. 

At the first intersection, rather than turn left as would take them out of the city, Wikus turned right, Shepherd following, assuming he knew the way much better. And he did. Just not exactly the route she'd be expecting. 

They were just so close. Closer to home than they’d ever been, and might ever be again. It felt so easy. 

Only a couple hours of walking. And hiding. For until the dead of night settled in there was still the occasional car to quickly dive away from, the tricky well lit path to navigate, many miserable walls and brick courtyards wealthier people so relied on.

And active security.

God, the security was a pain in the ass and the occasional gated communities they'd eventually need to evade made him cringe. Maybe if poleepkwa were the only cultural trouble people wouldn't be so inclined to hire personal guards to monitor their little communities anymore. More than once a flashlight had nearly roamed over them, but Shepherd was quick and able to drag him over and behind walls or onto sloped roofs so artfully she'd be in the air before he could blink yet still manage to land softly, like she'd suddenly transformed to a feather. One hour was lost laying on the shadowed side of a clay shingled roof, each tile terribly hard on their backs, but they made the best of it trying to identify stars in the pink, light polluted sky. 

Why his legs carried him into the city instead of out he didn’t know. Though every sense in him screamed to walk forward it also screamed to turn around, appreciate self-preservation. Once they were finally at the edge of his subdivision though he found it impossible not to go on. The street lamps glittered, and not a soul was out to enjoy the midnight air. The community had no security, because no one was quite affluent enough, though most houses, including his own, were barricaded in to some degree by brick and stone walls, many topped with ugly rolls of barbed wire. A bit of a joke because there were also a medley of windows fronting the street on all but a few houses.  
Before they knew it, they were creeping around a backyard fence of one of his neighbours and slipping between two houses into the cul de sac of Wikus’ home. 

Then he had a lifetime, until the sun began to rise again. And maybe they wouldn’t make it out of the city anyway. Maybe they would be captured in the No Man's Land trying to sneak under Sanctuary Dark's fencing or get lost on the way until someone found them roaming. 

Now that he’d finally stopped, Shepherd trailed close behind, her eyes wide at the rows of dark houses, the old and quickly stale scent of cooked meals, and the perfume of fruity air fresheners and candles that Wikus couldn’t sense from a distance in his own body but this one seemed eerily capable. They were truly in the depths of the subdivision now. He could hardly remember the true silence the night brought, when soon there was hardly the slightest swoosh of a distant car or the murmur of a television set. None of the drumming or melody that so regularly punctuated their lives could be found. The walls were too thick to hear the murmurs of hushed conversation or the crackling of a little fire, or the buzz of a flickering light bulb.

“It’s all so sterile,” Shepherd said beside him. “And quiet.”

She began to sneak towards a window to peak in, snapping Wikus out of his dazed meandering. Maintaining a distance was the only way it would take several glances to realize they weren’t humans out on a midnight stroll. Midway to the unlucky window Shepherd stopped on her own, slinking back into the darkness, pulling him off the street into a garden across from his own home.

Wikus' antennae twitched, listening.

There was no car in the driveway. A soft light was on in the house and the front step. Curiously, several of the front windows were boarded though through the smallest intact frame there was just the glimpse of a painted mural, a vibrant blue ocean surge, and surely if someone else had moved in that would have been painted over.

“That’s her house? Pfft, mine is better,” Shepherd said, leaving the garden.

Wikus walked past her. He'd seen something large and bright reflecting on the driveway.

“Not a very popular girl,” Shepherd said while he stared at the pavement in alarm. She scratched the graffiti with her foot, some of the white paint lifting off. When he looked up and noticed the dents in the garage door he could have screamed.

The connection between what the damage had been created by came with a wave of nauseous despair and fear.

She should have left, he thought. This was the worst place to be.

“Hey, the lights are on and you saw her today. It’s probably been there awhile. I could erase it if you want? I've got really sharp scales, you know,” she said calmly, scraping her foot across the ground again.

“It’s not worth fucking up the paving,” he said quietly, feeling the anxiety rise, roiling like an ocean at the peak of a hurricane. He could do nothing. He couldn’t even speak to her, to tell her to go.

The whirling anxiety was soon accompanied by a wave of anger at Piet, who should have been stopping this, who should have been doing something to help her before she could be murdered.

_For being married to you._

“You should knock on the door.”

He shook his head. It would just scare her to have two giant aliens suddenly at her front step and probably she wouldn’t open the door at all. Just scream and call the police, which was a perfectly reasonable response when cricket monsters came knocking at midnight.

Besides, she'd looked so exhausted sitting with her father.

“She needs to leave this place,” he said. “We need to leave. We'll just make it worse if people see us.”

“Does anyone else call this girl equal of the sun?” Shepherd asked as they slunk away back to the garden thick with concealing shrubs and shadowy trees.

“Not unless she’s asked them to,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, suddenly grabbing his book bag so he nearly toppled over.

“Fuck, what are you doing?”

“Just trying to draw us a map home with what you remember. Make a plan. To get out safely. Sit down,” she said, yanking him onto the grass before smoothing a spare piece of note paper on her knee. But Wikus was only half listening, watching the house. “We should try to take the train in the morning when it heads out to get everyone. It’ll still be dark and we can catch it at a railway crossing then hop off when we’re close, otherwise we’ll have to follow the tracks and I think that’ll be a three day walk since we’d have to keep hiding whenever there’s no cover. You know some of the maps to the Wall breaks, right? Cause I don’t.”

“Yeah, I published some of them.”

“Good.” 

And shoving the pen into his pack again, Shepherd bounded across the road and crouched at Tania’s front step, poking around the door.

Wikus yelped, running after her, disregarding who might see him. Before he could reach her, Shepherd was already meeting him halfway, dragging him backwards.

“Please say you didn't ask her to come to District 10,” he despaired.

“Hey, you can’t tell me you haven’t thought about her just showing up at your door.”

“Oh god, you did.”

“You refuse to tell us anything about why you like this… girl… so I have no reason to know why this is a bad idea.”

She was so cheerful while he was trying not to shake with panic.

“Why would you do that! How would she even fucking find me there’s two million fucking people there!”

“Some are kids,” she said, too self-satisfied. 

“She wouldn’t be allowed past the fucking check points. Why would you write that!”

“Slow down! I can’t understand your weird accent when you get freaked out. I didn’t write anything bad. Hey, I never lie,” Shepherd said, tapping his forehead. “But you can find out what sappy nonsense I wrote when you see her again.”

“Fuck, why would you do that! What the fuck, Shepherd, do you think about anything you fucking do before you fucking do it, ever!”

“You’re the one who’s making me walk hundreds of kilometres to get home because of some tiny human whose ass I could have kicked! I'm missing out on meaty bread for this. So I think I deserve this,” Shepherd said irritably. “I don’t understand you at all. You can’t be around humans for more than five minutes but this one is an exception and then you don’t even want to _try_ talking to her when you have a chance. How did you even meet, anyway? She must have worked for King of the Angry Jello, or I’d think so. If she wasn’t arrested back then she won’t be now, so calm down!”

Meeting was a topic Shepherd slipped into conversations many times. Right now though, Wikus had no interest in talking or deflecting her, he was too busy trying to see whether or not she’d left her note on the doorstep or had the foresight to put it through the mail slot where he couldn’t retrieve it. What an increasingly cursed day!

“It’s in the mail box, my tiny friend.”

“Why are you fucking like this!”

“Stop swearing, you’re getting loud! Maybe cause you never answer my questions. We’ve got all night now! And I didn’t ask her to come adventuring through the wilderness, the thing that we gotta now do! Stop walking in circles, you’re making me dizzy. How’d you meet? How’d King Jello find out? Think he hates us? He must hate us. I’m just gonna keep asking. It is a really, really long walk.”

He wanted to talk about Tania so badly. Ached for it. Their life and experiences together were a defining element of his identity. But even the adventures they'd had together as friends, rather than sharing a home, were too complicated. There were other poleepkwa who had close relations with humans, more than Wikus had any idea of. Some of those people made the choice to relocate to District 10, making themselves known in a way they wouldn’t have dared to before, for fear of imprisonment and social disgrace. Now the government didn’t bother arresting people who surrendered themselves to abject poverty or the whims of the checkpoint guards. Out of sight out of mind, he supposed. But on the whole none of that was comparable because he and Tania never faced the same kind of constraints and secrecy required.

Shepherd began poking his arm expectantly. 

“I met her studying, I guess,” he said, no longer pacing. He could have probably opened the door and retrieved whatever she’d left, but then what? That created more problems.

“So she’s who taught you to read so many languages. That makes sense," she said thoughtfully. “I guess she helped you get a non-shitty job then. Not sure why you bother shutting up about it.”

“You’d better shut up about it, there’s enough weird shit being spread around about me from our moonlight callers.”

“You told those nuts!” she cried, grabbing him so he could no longer move at all.

“No,” he said sharply. “They assume some things, and Canna’s cousin is happy to go your employer about it if I tell him to fuck off and find another translator.”

“Hey, she’s at the window!” Shepherd chirped, suddenly shaking him as she pointed with her tentacles. “See, told you she's fine.” 

Tania drifted by, head bowed, briefly visible through the one remaining window. His heart almost stopped, afraid she’d step outside, but she didn’t, passing quickly out of view.

“You know, Sky,” Shepherd said, looking at the driveway again. “If you like her so much, you know maybe she never belonged to this world anyway. Maybe she just belongs with us.” 

“We should go,” he said. “You’re still glowing.”

“Yeah. Kinda amazing no one is watching the place, eh?”

Normal security aside, Wikus had to admit that shocked him as well, one of the details that left him so outraged about Piet. If people were destroying windows, and scribbling graffiti, and shooting up the garage why the hell was Tania still here? And why the hell was no one at least trying to intervene?

It made no sense, unless she’d had a falling out with her family, which he might have considered had he not seen her amiably chatting with her father. Even that left Wikus more than a little heart sore. 

She’d said she believed him, she’d let herself be filmed saying so, and she hadn’t destroyed the door murals they’d painted every anniversary, of which there would be ten. Eleven if Wikus hadn’t dropped of the face of the Earth.

Yet she kept Piet in her life.

Somehow the man had slithered his way out of culpability, and even Wikus knew MNU was being investigated. There was always something going on with that company but there wasn’t a corner of the world that hadn’t heard about something as big as this. 

But Wikus also knew none of the footage from the subbasement had been openly published – which relieved him, because he couldn’t bear the thought of Tania having to see it. And as much as he enjoyed the image of Piet being burned to the ground, he didn’t really want Tania to see that either. 

Crossing the block, he and Shepherd slipped into the next copse of trees they found to begin their way home, blazing a trail where there were minimal chances of residents reporting sightings, to follow the suburbs out and after a small argument avoid entertainment districts (Shepherd whinging about not getting to see the night life), and then moan over what they agreed would be a miserable journey, for they would need to cling onto the outside of that bumpy train for more than an hour. Wikus tried to keep his mood up, to think only of the upcoming journey. 

“You gonna be okay?” Shepherd asked softly as they passed into a ravine. 

“Yeah,” he said absently, breathing slow. “Everything will be okay.”

But the black dogs crept around the edge of his mind, raising their noses, interested in the world once more. He could feel Shepherd's eyes on him and she threw a spiny arm over his shoulder drawing him closer.

“You’re right, you know. Everything will be okay. Can we stop at my old home, before we go?”

“Yeah. Yeah, we can do that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> angst angst angst.  
posting earlier than intended, please forgive mistakes. i read so many times for them my eyes glazed over.


	8. A Day When You Could Be Without It

In the motions of mindless habit, Tania crossed the living room to push the sofa to its usual place when the grip of anxiety squeezed her chest like a shadow hand. Luck wasn’t in her cards these past forty eight hours as the slight ache in her hands and feet reminded Tania of her continued worries. She’d bandaged the tips her fingers tips with gel from the aloe plant, who had fared much better than her toasted skin despite taking the brunt of the kettle’s abuse. 

Meanwhile in the kitchen a single glass panel remained, and other than the frosted strip of decorative glass in the door (far too small to squeeze through anyway) the front of the house was now unpleasantly exposed. Wood was as easy to pry off as windows were to break, yet much quieter and her mother’s voice sang in her head like a siren's beckoning call. _Stop inviting trouble. Stop intentionally hurting yourself._

So feeling quite strange, she decided tonight was to be the second time in nearly two years (the first had been the nauseating evening she'd seen the eviction footage aired) that Tania gathered pillow and blankets from the sofa to shuffle up the stairs, only tonight she would begin a new habit and heave the wardrobe back against the door to stand like a watchful golem. Good luck pushing that out of the way, vandals! She could lock it too, for extra measure. She could even bring the main phone line up, plug it into the wall upstairs so no one could separate her from the outside world. Now _that_ felt just a bit too far.

She'd just bundled the last of the blankets when the soft snapping of wood, the chink of the mail slot opening and closing, and a patter on front mat made her freeze like a rabbit before a hunting dog. Tania turned with dread, eyes half shut, to see the most unexpected of things. Carefully setting the blankets down she approached the front door like it might blast open at any moment, and picked up what had been so easily forced through the once heavily boarded mail slot.

It was a tiny wooden pipe, hardly bigger than her hand. Though the external decoration was rough, as if carved by inexperienced hands, the inside of the pipe looked functional enough. Like a miniature piccolo with no external keys, and considerably more irregular in its spacing. And just like a bottle bearing a message across the ocean, the entire length of the pipe was blocked.

Taking the strange bit of postage back to the kitchen, Tania pulled the crumpled paper out with tweezers and unfurled it.

“Why? Why is it me this is happening to when _I threw all your shit out, you little shit! I need a fucking library to read this noise_!” 

Or she could ignore it. Could pretend it didn’t exist. 

Except her house was once something of a library, in this particular subject. With an exasperated groan, Tania left the kitchen, flicking on each light she passed until she stood before the musty gloom of the basement, facing a pair of reindeer, small and distant and foreign in a winter storm. Stepping into the past, she thought. 

Somewhere in the gloom there’d be what she needed. She couldn’t possibly have managed to rid herself of all of them. There’d been so many dictionaries to be tripped over, and they’d sat around like cheerful but neglected mementos from school, when in actuality they'd both been too lazy to donate the lot. Those which were in tact at least. 

Down in the gloom was the heart of memory in her house, the halls of the little basement. They were lined with cluttered, overstuffed bookshelves, overflowing with dozens of rarely used cookbooks and dusty encyclopedias and romance novels from her grandmother’s home, and all those of Wikus’ grandparents that she’d insisted he keep when they passed away shorly after her own. Not to mention what they'd added themselves. It was one of the few things she hadn’t gone through because it was always a future task she’d never gotten to in any capacity. She’d always meant to thin out the books, long before the present and the recent past. 

And her mother had never gone through any of it either, because the memory of Tania’s grandmother brought her too much sadness. 

Half an hour passed by as Tania fruitlessly skimmed through the titles of books she hadn’t realized existed. Then squished between two cookbooks, she finally found what she needed. Tania extracted the dictionary with care, lest a stack of tomes pelt her in the head.

His writing and doodles were scribbled all over the inside. Tania laughed, sardonic, bitter, that this illegible mess had been inadvertently spared from the malicious tenacity of her mother’s minimalistic endeavour. This illegible mess that obscured half of what it was trying to contribute to the literary world and illustrated everything wrong with Wikus’ attitude towards work, like his general disinterest in paying close attention to anything going on around him. She couldn’t quite remember how he'd managed to pass even a single exam. Perhaps his teachers pitied the poor books he continued to maim and passing him was the only way to ensure their long term preservation, though they probably could have funded the university through the multitude of library fines.

Back upstairs, the piccolo’s tiny paper had no space for making even the briefest note, so Tania flipped over the envelope of a phone bill she'd been ignoring. Somehow adding to the chaos within the dictionary bothered her, like destroying something that should be a preservation. 

Quickly she realized how much she despised translation. It was slow and boring and all the alien symbols cramped together made for a rather daunting task. But though she felt both hot and cold as if in the moment of an argument or the receiving end of being berated, Tania was not discouraged. A few times she glanced at the huge panels of plywood to her right, freezing at the hint of nighttime sounds, and slow work was made slower. Shifting to the external side of the kitchen’s island for quick retreat, she rested her elbows on the granite. 

What loon even created this language to begin with! Was Afrikaans so much to ask for?

But she guessed the last words before reaching the end.

Tania stared at the envelope for a long time. As the clock ticked onward and she felt captured in timelessness, the translation so unmistakable.

Sometimes she wondered why she hadn't just left immediately. The moment the phone disconnected and left her with the last memory of his voice just as scared as her own. Or a bit later, when the world quieted down, when she’d found the flower. Catch the trains as they passed through and could carry her halfway to the ocean. 

Three in the morning, Tania slammed the dictionary down, shoved the sofa against the mail slot, and collapsed happily into her bed, a duvet and an old wardrobe between her and the rest of the world. 

She wondered what the piccolo sounded like. Wondered why it carried the words still whirling as she closed her eyes.

_ Glow in the dark, equal of the sun._

***

The scent and sizzle of frying butter pulled Tania from her sleep, and she glanced at the clock, seven thirty in the morning. A dream, came her first thought, until the scent creeping into her bedroom became too real and too insistent to be imagination. With a shock of memory it threw her anxiously into the past, like a moment frozen in time in a home filled with joy rather than crushing solitude. 

“I’ve cooked breakfast for you!” her mother suddenly called from beyond the wardrobe, the sudden noise making her heart jump. “Eggs, sausages, toast.” 

Groaning, Tania shoved the pillow over her ears until her mother knocked again, and again, out of tune with the frenzied pounding in her chest, until she couldn’t ignore the cheerful rapping. Like a clockwork doll, Tania lurched out of bed and descended into the once disaster of her kitchen, transformed into a new state of cleanliness and order. It was as if the last forty eight hours had never been but for the ugly wooden plywood hammered into the window frames and darkening the bottom floor. Her mother stood at the stove, small and birdlike, organizing the food which was undoubtedly meant for her daughter onto a single plate.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Tania murmured, shambling groggily to the island at her mother’s request. In the tidying of the house, the evidence of Tania’s late night activities had been relocated and lay openly beside a pile of bills and junk mail. Tania glanced at it guiltily, hoping it had been largely ignored. 

“Canned soup isn’t enough to live on,” she said. Lining the counter, she'd brought with her a carton of eggs, a pack of sausages now half gone, blood pudding, and had even boiled and fried potatoes while Tania slept. “The windows are going to be repaired this morning.”

“Thank you,” Tania said as a plate was placed in front of her. It was far too much to eat in one sitting, and more than Tania would bother to eat on the average day. She wanted to feign enthusiasm, it was just so early, and her vision so fuzzy from exhaustion, while the anxious racing in her chest refused to settle. She might as well have been trying to climb all fifty floors of the Carlton Centre from bottom to top. Her mother on the other hand? Well Kathleen Smit was as she always was in those times she had more than a couple minutes to throw on clothes and rush to her daughter’s aid. Well dressed beyond necessity, perfect make up before five in the morning when she undoubtedly woke up, and not a single hair out of place.

“You left the keys in the door again. Could you please, _please_ just start taking your safety seriously again? If not for yourself then for me. God knows how you can remember to move furniture around but not your keys.”

Tania rolled a sausage to one side of the plate and back again. “I just forgot. Sometimes people forget.”

“Not once a week they don’t. Why are your fingers bandaged?” 

“I burned them on the kettle yesterday.”

“I just really don’t know if you should be living alone,” she said, turning back to the stove.

As she did, Tania reached across to shut the mangled dictionary and shuffle the strange musical instrument beneath a stack of mail advertisements and dusty envelopes.

“It’s just a few stupid mistakes,” Tania said. Wasn’t it?

But her mother noticed the sudden movement.

“Why do you still keep these things?” she asked, exasperated. 

“That old piccolo? I wanted to clean out more of the basement. Actually, I think it might have been more of a joke from Ayanda when we were in school.”

Why she bothered trying to deflect, Tania wasn’t sure, since the instrument looked like exactly the kind of nonsense Wikus would make, except potentially more functional than usual. 

“‘_Glow in the dark, equal of the sun_’? Do you enjoy lying to me? How is this helping you move on?”

“It was in a box of stuff from school. I didn’t remember there were textbooks in there. And I wanted to know what the note said before throwing it away with everything else.”

“Why would that be necessary?” her mother said, exhaling slowly. “Bills and legal documents are the sort of paperwork you should be keeping not scribbled on garbage from trash who completely betrayed you and-”

“You know some of that artwork is mine, right?” Tania snapped. It wasn’t. “That the murals on the doors were also done by me?” They were. 

“Why should I erase my own existence? Anyway, Dad told me everything published was all a crock of lies,” Tania added through a mouthful of egg. “Which is all the more reason to leave things as they were.”

“He said that for your benefit.”

“Then he shouldn’t have said it at all.”

“Tania-” her mother began, but Tania’s anger was creeping back. Would she ever live in a world where every conversation about her life didn't circle back to the same damn subject! But she knew exactly how to shut her mother up, even if she hated herself for doing it.

“Did you not consider how this would blow back on me? How it_ has _blown back on me? Why am I an exception in your mind instead of just abhorrent? When my husband is the first person? When I had doctors and WHO and Americans and other organizations from god knows what country interviewing me and cornering me into humiliating tests?” 

“And they found nothing. You’re not some kind of contaminated vector, Tania. You need to stop seeing yourself that way or things are never going to get better.”

“And the whole world doesn’t know that! Why didn’t he leave me out of it!” 

But she was getting teary from the anger, and didn't want that, and fought against sliding into it.

“Sweetie, your dad didn’t mean for any of that to happen,” she said gently. “He just had an obligation to keep the public safe by being transparent.”

It sounded perfectly reasonable, perfectly sensible. And perfectly convenient. It would be true too, if everything was real, if everything was honest, and Tania's chest tightened, her heart erratically fluttering and loud, like she could hear every tick. And what if it was real, if she was just hysterical and always let things circle back to the same subject when she could have been the one to try harder. If it was real, it could be real, she hated to not know. What then? What next? Maybe she just wanted someone to validate her disbelief, so she let it come up every other conversation, maybe she was obsessed. Maybe her mother saw things better and she was haunting herself.

_That's not you_. 

Then she let anger suffocate all else. 

“And immediately publishing the source of the illness was necessary to find a terminally ill man? Can’t just say it’s contagious and start there? I don’t care how else zoonotics pass between our species when I'm not infected, so tell me how it isn’t a lie! That they didn’t say nonsense about my husband to ruin him! Dad hated Wikus and he destroyed him in every way a person can be destroyed when he let them publish that and he did it_ at my expense_. I’m not hungry,” she said, dropping her fork. “That is why I eat canned soup. I'm going back to bed.” 

Tania pushed her chair in, the legs grinding loudly against the tile, shutting out her mother’s protests and heading for the stairs. Then before the decision could be made for her, turned and snatched the piccolo, dictionary, and little note from the counter lest they be squirreled away or destroyed. 

Minimalism. She’d come to hate the word with such a fury. 

Maybe it was just another prank, she thought, dropping the objects unceremoniously on the mirrored table in her bedroom. A strange, freakish, coincidentally worded prank. She could hear her mother bustling around in the kitchen, tidying up, and hoped she left the food wrapped in saran in the fridge. Probably she would. The war against excess belongings never extended to throwing away food. She came from money the way her father did but spurned that sort of waste. 

Though she didn’t hear a door open or close, after awhile she suspected the house was empty again, and her mind returned to the little note.   
There was something off. Something other about it. Her discomfort came from the fact that the writing itself was different. The silly little flourishes Wikus’ writing had where he was too slow to lift the pen from the page weren’t present and it was always particularly clear when that writing wasn’t human. She almost couldn’t recall the quirk, except that all his scribbles in the dictionary featured it and she hadn’t noticed a single exception. 

Which left her with two possibilities. Someone else had written this, who wanted to fuck with her, who was once _close_ to her (a thought that was almost unbearable), or Wikus had changed his calligraphy for reasons unknown. Perhaps it was easier when your hands weren’t human-  
Her breath hitched. Assuming that thought had an iota of validity. 

She pulled one of her old sonograms off the mirror, its magnet flying onto the carpet and zipping under the bed. She wouldn’t bother to collect it. Studying the image briefly, Tania took the other two and placed them together, then the little note, and scribbled envelope too, and folded it all into the dictionary. 

When had life become such a tattered mess? One without answers for anything. Unbidden her thoughts traveled back to the news, to the documentary that she’d suffered through so many times despite so much effort not to. They’d collected so much footage, of so many things, except the hospital, who refused to release written medical reports even to Tania when she’d tried to demand it. And oh how the heavens would have quaked at her wrath that day. Mhlanga had, likewise, managed only to leak medical reports (disturbing ones, she assumed, regarding the nonhumans), which were still not shared with the public. Someone else had stolen camera recording of the twentieth floor, that socially cursed place (not particularly insightful, probably included to add credibility). She’d visited Mhlanga in prison once, but he couldn’t actually say anything, not before the trial, he only assured her that Wikus wouldn’t betray her. Or tried to. She’d been too cracked up at the time to really absorb any of it. It was just so overwhelming. And there were other implications with her own family’s involvement, with Piet being at the center of power. 

Too much for one sorely tired person to untangle. 

But if he was alive…

How could a nonhuman even make it to the city anyway? 

And what would she even do with that information? 

Maybe she could write something inside the piccolo, or whatever it really was. She thought about blowing on it experimentally before self-preservation suggested otherwise. Just in case it really was someone’s idea of another prank, suddenly reminded of the evening she'd watched a pair of kids unsuccessfully try to set a bear trap outside her door before being captured by Ayanda and hauled off by their enraged mothers. The trap hadn’t been meant for Tania, but being the person to most likely step on it, she rather enjoyed having two functional legs as much as she enjoyed not being poisoned. 

But the memory of spotting sinister visitors left here with another realization, that leaving the instrument outside again would be too obvious and too strange, wouldn’t it? A pipe just sitting by the front door as if accidentally dropped, when her mother and soon repairmen would be so often visiting. 

_So I will leave something in the dark. I will leave a memory. Something innocuous. Something secret. Something safe. If it sits there for eternity, that’s nothing. Tonight. _

_I just need… to think of something._

_That won’t be stolen._

Dropping everything into the small desk drawer, Tania set about her plan. What else was there to do? She didn’t start work until Tuesday. 

***

The solution to this conundrum hit Tania like a riptide in the early afternoon, pulling her out from the fridge and the cold potatoes she’d been picking at. Like a perfect ray of sunshine, the fridge’s light cut the pantry’s door in half, and beneath it blue and green and vibrant, the ocean, roiling amid wind, white crests folding where the waves peaked and turned violently upon themselves again. Swallowing the last chunk of potato, only a rubbery egg and oily sausage remained that she slid back onto the shelf, their plastic wrap cover still crushed and pushed aside.

Everything greyed out save the blue of the ocean. Like a bird escaping its nest in a flurry of feathers and birdbrained panic, Tania flitted around for her ever missing keys, grabbed them from a sidetable, and was out the door fast as her still swollen feet could be crushed into sandals.

  
As the wind took the door, slamming it at her back, Tania’s mother, her flaxen blonde hair pulled back into an updo with pearls, locked her own car with the quick beep of a remote lock. Much more put together than the morning, pants and simple blouse had been exchanged for a pale, silver dress. Because of course there were lower class workers to keep appearances with.

“Hi, mum!” Tania cried, blowing by her as she trotted down the path.

“Tania?”

Tania whirled around, waving happily.

“Bye, mum! Just going out awhile, getting some paint. To redo the doors, you know! Thought a change would be good!”

“Do you want some help picking colours? The window people will be here shortly, but we could go after.”

“I have some colours in mind. Just wanted to get out and get started, you know. Sorry for earlier.”

“Just keep your eyes on the road,” her mother called after her. 

“I will!” she called happily back from the edge of the driveway just as several workman’s vehicles pulled into the cul de sac, made obvious by the ladders braced in their roof racks.

No one would interfere her mood she decided, pulling onto a main street outside the subdivision, air blowing on her face from the still missing window. In the past, the feelings of strangers scarcely touched her, nothing like the way she allowed them to now.

She took stock of how many people she’d need to tolerate and came to three, tops. Maybe someone to call the department, then whoever mixed primer and pigment together, and the cashier. Everyone else was meaningless. Wisps lost on the wind.

“For today,” she said to herself, loud as she could, and laughed above the radio. Mimicking her mother’s voice, at its most chiding, she recited, “Because really, Tania, who put these people anywhere above you.” Then snorted, laughing again.

The hardware store bustled with customers when she arrived and as Tania walked by each of them, not for a second did she catch their eyes. A great wall of colour palettes dominated one of the aisles. And that would take time. How did you choose among hundreds of colours that were only slightly different? Pale but saturated. Not too garish against the yellowish brick but garish enough. Shortly later, bright blue pigment was rattling in the mixer, she’d found rollers and brushes, and been on her way. And if people looked at her strangely, Tania didn’t notice, lost thoroughly in the wilderness of her own thoughts. 

Back in the car, feeling suddenly clever, she made a final stop. A craft store, where one extra person to communicate with became two extra. 

“Would you have glow in the dark paint?”

“Last aisle on the left,” a young boy said in a bemused yet bored tone. Maybe he glared as he said it, maybe he had no interest in the lives of others whatsoever. Tania would never know, and he soon continued the drab task of replenishing barren shelves.

A beautiful, incident free afternoon under a clear blue sky and a warm sun. Returning to a full driveway, she parked behind her mother, who remained absorbed in some unheard conversation with a repairman. 

“Blue,” Tania said, setting the can down with a clank and clatter as the other tools followed. “Is beautiful with the pale brick, do you think?”   
Her mother beamed.

“Are you only doing the outside?” 

There of course was the slight disappointment, but there was also triumph, and Tania knew her mother was storing this perceived victory for another day. 

“For now,” she said as if she had not caught the leading tone. The woman was not conniving or malicious, no, there was a kind of love behind all of her mother’s motivation that Tania tried to store herself, to keep in mind when she was at her most frustrated. And Tania wished and wanted so much more than her mother might ever understand for nothing more than to close the space between them before it became too wide, because it was not just his daughter who Piet had chosen to lie to. Had Mrs Smit not adored and trusted her husband so completely, as was the fault of many a wife, there’d be no cavernous ravine to navigate, no rickety bridges to mend.

All the windows looked to be set, just waiting a bit of clean up. Kathleen was not one to fuss around when paid work was to be done though, and so the people repairing the windows quickly took her attention from Tania.   
Funny, really, she hadn’t even noticed the graffiti was gone. 

While her mother was engaged ensuring not a single bit of debris sullied the tiny patch of garden, Tania set to work. When at last a field of blue glistened wet before her eyes and her clothes damp with sweat that found its way down her back with hands and wrists covered in paint, Tania returned to her car, digging out the glow in the dark paint and a tiny brush. As she painted her faded memory of the constellations, thinking it was subtle, but hopefully not too subtle to those who were looking, truly looking, she wondered if she’d need to turn the front porch light off and if that would matter to vandals. 

But then there were always the mercenaries now anyway. 

Her neighbours might even be grateful for the extra security her miserable situation suddenly brought them free of charge. Certainly they’d petitioned for the community to hire security before, though Tania couldn’t quite remember who’d been most incessant about it.

There were perhaps ways to trick the vandals too. She could keep all the inside lights off, maybe, long before the sun fell. Keep the curtains drawn. Let the garden thrive unruly and wild with neglect. Imply abandonment. No one lived here, so don’t waste time. 

But then he might think she was gone too.

She watched a car roll into an adjacent driveway, the engine of a silver monstrosity purring, but stayed crouched behind a planter and its shriveled, long dead shrubbery. 

“Dinner’s nearly sorted!” her mother called.

“Be right in!”

Tania squirreled the glowing paint under the desiccated shrub to retrieve later, the rest went to the garage. 

“Maybe you should shower first,” Kathleen suggested, head sudden poking outside, bringing with it a whiff of garlic.

“Yes, that would be a very good idea. What did you make, smells good.”

“I made soup. Real soup, not salt water.”

Looking once more at her own creation, knowing that it may still be true she was leaving something for the dead, and not for Wikus, well, Tania supposed that wasn’t so bad. 

There'd been no other memorial made. Because who mourned the dead of District 9? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes the world needs to slow down. And I forget this.  
Thank you to everyone who has commented on this story here and elsewhere and to the wonderful shadow people who never say a word but are here all the same. You make sharing what started as a file called d9jokecomicabouttania.txt a joy. 
> 
> This is a strange journey into a quiet fandom and all I can think is how it's been seven months and where will this be in another seven. My only sadness is to not have been around in the era when everyone was writing tales of their OCs and head canons. 
> 
> Fiction is the propagation of light.  
As is the next chapter's title.


	9. The Propagation of Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the break! Hopefully not another however many months.

So it came, the first day Tania Smit reentered the world of the living and Tania van der Merwe was left in the world of the dead. Or so she hoped.

She woke shaken by nausea, hungry and unable to eat, exhausted like she’d never slept in her life, and far too attached to the blankets and pillows hiding her from the morning light.

Who was to ferry her downtown remained a mystery, even when a musical knock rattled the door like an impatient percussionist trying to break in, and Tania peaked through the frosted window. A scarcely familiar form waited, and she rolled her eyes before stepping out.

Leaning against the alcove’s wall, Cecilia was adorned in the same rolled up pants and shimmering platform shoes as before, and she yawned, glancing at her watch. She’d thrown a blazer over a plaid blouse, which might have rounded her look off as somewhat professional if the shirt hadn’t been knotted at her waist to show off several inches of midriff.

If Tania had been given even a little extra time, she might have overdressed for the department she was about to join. She couldn’t remember with any confidence what the typical attire for a low ranking office worker was – felt stupid not knowing something so basic, something that ought to be common sense – at least not this early in the morning. So Tania greeted Cecilia wearing one of her nicer more conservative summer dresses, that draped over her plain flat shoes. When she’d been in the design studio, all those memories ago, denim was the general standard; it took up most of the wardrobe now halfheartedly blocking her bedroom door. At least Cecilia made a nice buffer when it came to judging classic professionalism.

Jingling keys and a lanyard were spinning around the woman’s index finger, while she blissfully observed the clouds, and then Tania, voraciously chewing a wad of pink gum.

“Seriously?” Tania said, closing the door, the whirling keys reminding her to lock it. A bubble popped in Tania’s face as Cecilia leaned forward. “You belong in Hollywood, you know that?”

“I make sure I do,” Cecilia said curtly, pulling the gum back into her mouth, beckoning Tania to follow and nodding at the blazing red truck now parked in the driveway. “In you go, princess.”

Just outside the cul de sac, she slowed down and poked her head out of the window, laughing. “Still here, Lwazi? What, not good enough to be assigned elsewhere, baas?”

It took a moment for Tania to realize who Cecilia had noticed. It was the man she and the police officer had quarrelled with the week prior and it seemed like a particularly strange (and insensitive) moniker for an English woman to address him with, but if the mercenary felt any degree of irritation he hid it well. Lwazi snorted dismissively, they obviously knew one another, but Cecilia laughed again having stopped the truck entirely, while Tania tried to find anything to look at except the two of them. She settled with studying the dashboard, as if about to tune a radio station.

“Of course, this wouldn’t be a punishment for you being an absolute ass, being stuck here, every day, every night,” Cecilia continued, her voice ever more saccharine. “That wouldn’t be ethical. What’s that I hear? Silence?”

“You finished up?”

“Have a good day, then,” Cecilia chimed as the truck lurched into gear and he glowered in her rear view mirror.

Tania sunk lazily into her seat, watching the scenery fly by.

Much shorter and darker and with deep brown hair, Cecilia was barely reminiscent of her brother but for the English accent and pale blue eyes. Tania tried to see him in her, she’d known of the man for fifteen years, having occasionally crossed paths at company events, but even side by side they'd be strangers. So the silence stretched on, radio off, as if Cecilia was waiting for a conversation to start, which after several awkward minutes didn’t seem like a bad idea. Tania had questions.

“What even is your job?”

Cecilia smiled, glanced from the road a brief second. “There you are. Thought you might be scared of me! Hmm, I run errands, tidy up, bring people coffee, all that. I ain’t a desk jockey, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, actually, it wasn’t,” Tania said. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. She couldn’t imagine this twitchy woman handling the slow pace of desk work for more than a second. By the same token, she couldn’t imagine much. She clearly wasn’t a mercenary of any kind, the sort that Tania had anticipated this morning, though she had hoped her mother would have been recruited. “Why did he choose you?”

“Hmm?”

“For this,” she said, gesturing at the wheel.

“They didn’t. I just thought I'd give someone a break,” Cecilia said. “I’m not like that idiot back there. I have no vendetta with you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“I'm not,” Tania said.

“I'd hope you have no vendetta with me based on relations,” Cecilia continued, tapping the wheel. Maybe that was so, but Tania was a long way from being an equal. “I hate sadists. I've got no time for them. All they do is fuck plans up.”

She popped a final bubble before sticking the pink wad into a takeaway cup of old coffee.

“Little boys,” Cecilia continued with a laugh. “Give them a little bit of power and they lose their heads.”

Tania stared at her, startled, unsure if she was referencing the past with unbridled tactlessness and unsure of what to say. They'd all seen the helicopter footage live, the entire country, gruesome though it was.

“Want some?” Cecilia asked, wiggling a piece of wrapped gum between her fingers like a cigarette.

“I’m fine. Aren’t you a bit, you know, young? My father said you got your brother his job.”

“Course I did. How would a man like that do anything on his own? I was a volunteer back then. A _student_. I'm just very good at errands. And today I'm an escort. I thought I'd be a better candidate to show you around. Your mum might be a little confused you’re not there. I forgot to let her know.”

“You mean she’s waiting at the house!”

“She would’ve just dropped you at the door. It’s a whole other world out here. A hermit such as yourself needs a little pinch of help, I think.”

“I’m not a hermit,” Tania said, rummaging about for her phone. Better to send a message before she got a voicemail box flooded with maternal panic. “I go out.”

“Trips to the grocery market must be _riveting_.”

“Ugh, you know I go to pubs, too.”

“How boring.”

“Cecilia,” she said, exasperated as she typed out a suitable apology text, “maybe you don’t know this, but people have three types of interaction with me. They shout, or try to discreetly shuffle away like I'll plague their kids, or throw crap at me.”

“Oh, I know.”

“What do you do for fun then, if your life is so much more exciting?”

“Pubs are only fun if you know how to take advantage of the full experience.”

“That’s not a privilege I have.”

“Know what’s real fun – you’re going to laugh at me for this – geocaching. You always find interesting things, the perfect excuse for road trips too. I like to leave cryptic messages around the country. But you know, hang gliding, that’s pretty cool, martial arts – I’d say you should probably take a class if I wasn’t worried your peers might vent themselves on you at least a little. I could probably teach you something but I’m always working.”

“How do you travel then?”

“I take my work with me?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Let me know if anyone gives you trouble. I don’t like people interfering.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“If anyone in your boring work circle is a dick, tell me.”

Tania nearly scoffed. As if that would improve anything rather than stir up more trouble. But she did have an anxiety tightening in her chest the closer they got, as the tower loomed near. If her co-workers were horrible (and probably they would be subtly horrible, being aware of who her father was), would she be able to stay long, to push their hatred aside and just focus on work, focus on the goal. Financial independence freed her from her family. That had to mean something, had to be worth it. Why it was such an urgent need Tania still couldn’t place, her parents still weren’t the enemy. People like Cecilia were, who were condescending and bigoted, people who would prefer her dead or locked away from society. So why was there a niggling instinct telling her to get away from the only living humans who still gave a damn?

Probably anxiety, she thought. The fear the whole world would abandon her with no warning.

They soon enough arrived, pulling around the side of the building and queuing up behind an SUV. The boom gate’s bar quickly closed and Cecilia huffed. Then out popped a lanyard from a thin chain around her neck and she scanned her card to pass into the secured parking of a well lit underground garage.

“So you work with Piet?”

“I work with everybody, really. Wherever I'm needed. But since he is the Managing Director of this country’s division I suppose you could say that. And the same about yourself, provided you last more than five minutes. I set up a betting pool, so if you could just hold out a month that would be great. I'll get you a box of chocolates or something.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, unable to stop cold cynicism slipping into her voice. Suddenly ‘interference’ made sense. “So much for old friendships.”

“Between us? I don’t even know you.”

“No, other people.”

“Hah, right, _that_ crowd. Sorry, that should’ve been obvious who you meant. I don’t associate with those piss babies. They’re so _boring_, like watery eyed little mice. Be glad you’re not working with them, they've got nothing to talk about except who’s having a baby or the news or taped episodes of yesterday’s shows. The most exciting gossip coming out of there is a filing fuck up. It’s sad to watch. You should really take off that ring though.”

“How did you know?” Tania asked, and without knowing quite why she listened, pulled the necklace off, tucking it safely into her purse.

“Lucky guess? I get paid to see shit other people miss.” Cecilia shrugged. She flicked a finger toward another employee stepping out of his car as they rolled by. “That man there? Suffers incontinence. Always adjusting his diaper, which I would too, it’s gotta be uncomfortable.”

Tania watched him shuffle his trousers around before Cecilia had moved on, attention sliding over the growing number of people pulling bags and briefcases from their back seats and marching to the stairwells.

“She switches what hand her wedding ring is on every time she goes on lunch for the past two months. I'll let you guess why. And she always neglects to lock her car doors.” As she leaned over Tania, gesturing openly, a woman caught Cecilia’s eye, face hardening into a glare off utter hatred. Cecilia smiled. “That woman there worked in the subbasement, third floor, always smelled like antiseptic, had some real gross flaky hands. Not hard to guess at her skeletons. She’s been a desk jockey over a year now, and smells like her nasty house which is almost definitely riddled with ant colonies. Vile woman. I imagine she'll have some legal problems on the horizon once that kid's leak goes to trial.”

“What’s in the subbasement?”

“Football fields of concrete halls and poor ventilation. Bit of rubble. Hell of a lot pipes.”

The truck slowed, carefully squeezing into a spot too small to accommodate its bulk, beside a motorcycle whose owner must have been well aware of their neighbour, having parked as far from Cecilia’s spot as possible.

“This is our stop. Can’t have you late, it'll ruin my betting pool,” she said, and she kicked the door open, not flinching even when it hit the wall adjacent, leaving paint on the grey concrete. They departed in silence, taking the stairs up.

In the atrium, now teeming with activity, the aura of a hundred coffee cups, and yawning workers, Cecilia leaned into her again, providing random information unsolicited and of questionable veracity. She'd dropped her voice and from her quick movements it became harder to identify who she was referencing. Or shit talking, in Tania’s opinion.

“That gal? Now she's a real monsterfucker. I was surprised she didn’t leave the city. Not that anyone knows. Her husband dumped her ass though. She was a rights activist in her spare time. So was her husband actually. Lucky she didn’t lose her job. But again, who knows? You now maybe, but your word is meaningless.”

“How-”

“A touch of blue paint on her fingertips on certain days.”

“Seems like a leap,” Tania said, annoyed, before curiously checking her own hands for evidence of her redecorating, wondering if Cecilia meant it as a veiled jab at her. There was nothing. “You shouldn’t spread rumours like that. People get hurt from it.”

“If you base an assumption on one detail; I don’t. And I don’t spread rumours.”

“It’s paint,” Tania hissed.

“Have you ever seen a prawn up close? In real life, I mean.”

“Actually, I haven’t.” In fact the closest she ever might have been was a glance across the street or a quick passing by on the far side of a grocery market. As a general rule you avoided individuals who might become suddenly violent. A surprising achievement given the number of years they'd lived in the city. She’d never actually spoken with one of them.

“Those things are obsessed with colour, they’ll cover themselves in anything they can get their hands on, they're like children that way. Hmm, maybe that comparison isn’t the best followup to discussing terato. I suppose you don’t know that word either.”

Tania didn’t, but she also wasn’t especially interested in the woman’s insight.

“Oh! And he worked in the basement too, though I won’t be surprised if he resigns in a few months. Man's clearly bored. Weird cause he cozied up with the prawns too. Platonically, I mean. Another activist. Wholesome really. Though if they knew what his job was at the time I think he'd have turned up in a ditch.”

“What was it, then?”

She smirked and clicked her tongue, moving on as if that was answer enough. Clearly a penchant for cryptic messages extended to more than just treasure hunting.

“That dude's got some interesting skeletons too, though there’s not time to detail them,” she said as they passed the receptionists' desk. “He is _incredibly_ obnoxious so I'd avoid him if you can. Hates his job so he wants all of us to suffer with him.”

She was either the nosiest person Tania had ever encountered or a private investigator of some sort, though it was curious just how much she was making up. If the company did background check the minute, private lives of its employees it seemed a bit odd that they either didn’t care about some of these things, or Cecilia purposefully withheld certain information. Particularly with activist groups, who often were involved in criminal activity and had regularly targeted company projects and vehicles.

But Tania only had to think on her next question a second.

“You really see so much?”

“I see everyone.”

“Then what are Piet’s skeletons?”

Cecilia paused with her wolfish smirk, a twitch of surprise crinkling her eyes and lifting her cheeks.

“You waste no time. All our skeletons. All four thousand six hundred thirty two people who come in and out of this place. All of us are all of him.”

“That’s a riddle, is it?”

“Other than Dirk, he is the fulcrum of us all. Of course that’s not including the thousands of other people who come and go, visitors , clients, contractors. I'd think the building could move several more thousand a day.”

How underwhelming. Maybe he didn’t have any interesting things to hide that were benign enough in nature for Cecilia to disclose. Piet had never been a rebellious man and it would be a betrayal of her employer to comment on the truly interesting. As far as Tania knew his time off was spent on repetitive dinner parties with her mum and listless peers, but he spent far more time at work than home. She would have loved an opportunity to trip Cecilia up, startle her into saying something, but that seemed vastly unlikely now or in the distant future.

As they crossed the hall, slowly being noticed and slowly hearing whispered shock growing in volume, somehow Cecilia was invisible to most of the people whose eyes trailed lazily over Tania and contorted towards a state of bewilderment. Not a single soul greeted this small woman in her sparkling red shoes or vivid lipstick, though she stood out like a zebra amid a field of drab antelope. If their drowsy eyes happened to meet Cecilia’s, the people of MNU made sure to quickly turn their heads, sometimes with a flicker of dislike (a slightly downturned mouth, a half-hearted eye roll), so that soon Tania couldn’t tell which of their odd pair the disdain was meant for. Calculated neglect, really. As if engaging with Cecilia was a threat.

The further they meandered into crowd though the less focused Cecilia became, her stories ceased. As the elevator opened, blissfully empty, Cecilia seemed to almost breathe a sigh of relief the moment they were tucked snugly behind thick metal walls in the embrace of a low rumble of cables.

“Disgusting,” Cecilia said suddenly, nose wrinkling as the lift ascended to the forth floor. “The third floor ought to ban popcorn. Others have.”

Only a few more seconds, and they were there. The day ready to begin.

“Here we are! Safely delivered. Yours is the third door on the right. Good conversation,” she said. “Don’t forget! One month. You can handle that, right?”

Before Tania could reply, Cecilia was already waving between closing doors and the elevator chimed as it carried on into the higher reaches of the skyscraper.

A month. She wondered how many people Cecilia would have inadvertently spurred into harassing her for a petty victory.

It didn’t matter. She needed income to be independent. That’s all this job, this place, was. Better to be cynical about it than hope for any measure of enjoyment.

Despite her resolve, the anxiety had space to expand and began blooming inside, a great inferno of stomach twisting fear begging her to go back and walk home. She drifted forward as if in a daze, only to be barred by an electronic lock. Tania gave the door a meek tap, heat already rising in her cheeks. Half hoping no one heard. She blushed entirely red when it opened to a woman in hijab blinking at her serenely.

“Heidi, I think you've got company!” the woman shouted, leaning back over her shoulder.

A sharp nosed, middle-aged woman, eyes creased in the faintest squint, popped her head into the hall within the department. “We just spoke about shouting. Good morning, Ms Smit, glad you made it. I'd like a word in my office.”

“See you in a few minutes then,” the other woman said, before frowning. “Er, did you know your foot's bleeding?”

Tania glanced down. “Great.”

“I'll find some bandages from the restrooms,” she said, drifting off.

“Welcome to the department, Miss Smit,” the woman said. Thin and with a sharp edge in her tone, Tania couldn’t help but be reminded of a headmistress. She followed her into a small plain office, not shutting the door. “Please sit, we’re all very casual here. I’m Heidi, the head supervisor. If you have questions or problems, please bring them to me. I imagine you heard Mariam shrieking. She’ll be training you today.

“You’ll need to get properly registered after your shift. They'll give you an ID card and passcode so you can get into the department and the underground parking. Everything’s locked until 7:00am even with your code. Registration is in the atrium; I’ve already spoken with them so all you need to do is let them know who you are. They might need a photo. Questions so far?”

“Um, no.” She felt suddenly very small and very alone and very aware that anyone walking by could hear and she found herself shrinking in the little chair. It was a very grey place, grey carpet, grey desk, the only personalization a colourful bobblehead cat sitting on the computer’s tower, a grinning orange tabby faintly jiggling. Everything was prone to echo in the silence, and if she could hear the slight wobble of the cat, then the people in the other rooms could hear her too.

“This is your rough schedule,” Heidi said, pulling a chart from within her desk and sliding it across. “We can discuss any changes tomorrow. Now, Mr. Smit told me you’re prone to headaches and sometimes experience confusion, so if you need to leave early, for any reason, please don’t be afraid to ask. I won’t pry. You’re not the only person in such a position here.”

“You don’t need to be nice to me because my father told you to,” Tania whispered.

“You’re misunderstanding," Heidi said sharply. "I don’t care who your family is. I’ll be as cruel to you as l want, and the amount I want is not at all. He told me only to respect your name change and that you have some health challenges. Just try to do a good job and you’ll be fine. I think that’s about all right now,” she said, glancing up. A head popped out from behind the door frame.

“Got you some things for your foot. I'm Mariam. How about I show you around the department. I won’t shout, Heidi. But first that looks like a nasty cut.”

They left the office, taking a brisk walk in which Mariam described each room they passed and what purpose it served. The department was smaller than Tania initially imagined, with twenty one work stations in the main room each housing a basic computer. This, Mariam explained, was because they only dealt with a fraction of the company’s data, with other portions of the fourth floor taking various roles.

In some ways, bubbly and enthusiastic and colourful, Mariam felt like Cecilia’s soul sister, just friendlier and less invasive. Her deep purple scarf was matched by her lipstick, both vibrant against her dark skin, and Tania was relieved to see she hadn’t underdressed, for like her Mariam wore a simple dress, only far more cheerful. Sparkling yellow shoes peaked out from beneath the pale yellow and crisp pleats of her skirt, accounting for most of Tania's comparison.

“Not to be too nosy, but how did you end up with cuts like that?” she asked as Tania flicked off her shoe and sat on the counter of a cramped two stall restroom, nose wiggling from the air freshener. Mariam wet some towel for her and Tania dabbed away the mess once again, simply happy it wasn’t bleeding freely or infected.

“Um, thank you.”

“No problem.”

“I stepped on some broken glass the other day,” Tania said quietly.

“Ouch. Looks like most of it’s _heeled_ nicely,” Mariam replied with a wink.

Tania almost laughed in spite of her fear before quickly looking away and aware of the tension, Mariam busied herself wringing water from a fresh towel and flicking through a first aid kit for a suitable bandage.

“Sorry about this,” Tania said.

“No rush. Office ain’t going anywhere. Though I wish it would.”

Five minutes later Mariam set out again and they circled the office together, passing an internal break room, the only place amid the plethora of grey that had more character than Heidi’s orange cat. The fridge was plastered with cheesy magnets, a series of coloured sticky notes, and a handwritten ballad decrying moulding food that plagued the break room every month. It had a little tune to go with it, that Mariam hummed as she pointed it out. A previous coworker had once posted this in a fit of passive aggressive whimsy, a woman who had become disenfranchised with everything except the spoiling contents of the refrigerator. Where she was now Mariam didn’t know but her ballad remained while the mouldy puddings returned.

After the loop, they returned to the main room.

“Righty, so this will be your work station probably, right beside mine. I’ll show you how to work the programs. We split between data entry and data checking for ergonomics and also because one of the older supervisors found people work better when they’re not bored and not checking their own work. Not to say it doesn’t get boring, because it does. I think the people transcribing recordings probably have a better time, but that’s our neighbours down the hall. One group gets to handle company complaints, and I do so wish that was me. There must be some real entertainment in there. Anyway, we mostly work with numbers. You’re gonna go home tonight and all you’ll see when you close your eyes is numerical strings, and I am so sorry for that.”

Tania watched in silence while Mariam navigated the computer beside her, her attention already waning, sliding back towards the other ten women currently in the room, all who seemed to have made a blatant attempt to not look at her or say hello.

“You know I’m surprised you chose to work here and not in the Department of Doublethink,” Mariam said absently.

“The what?”

“Oh, right, my bad. It’s your- never mind. The Department of Alien Relations. ‘Doublethink’, we call it. I guess I use that so much I forget its real name, hah. It's where the craziest gossip comes from to be honest.”

“I’m a graphic designer. I’m not qualified for any of that,” she said, wanting to move away from the topic, to go no where near it. But how could she avoid it, when everyone was always filled with questions Tania didn’t want to touch. “I'm not even sure what they really do up there.”

“Yeah, same,” Mariam said thoughtfully, chin resting in her palm. “But it’s all hush hush so who really knows?”

And if Tania thought about it even a little, she really didn’t know other than what could be easily gleaned from the name or the few things Wikus prattled (or more often whinged) about. But it was a huge department dealing with the entirety of the nonhumans’ presence.

“Are you ready to start?” Mariam asked.

“No. No, I thought I could do this but I can’t. I can’t be around people.”

Mariam rolled her chair closer.

“This is about the scandal, am I right?”

Tania nodded. She didn’t have the courage to say the people pretending not to listen would be harbouring secret hostility or admit that now that she was here, surrounded by them, she couldn't just let go of other people’s opinions.

“Yeah, I shouldn’t have gotten close to things. I'm gonna be blunt, is that alright?”

She twitched her head in the barest semblance of consent, staring at her feet and the three wheels of a chair she’d never sit in again. There was a star shaped water mark on the carpet. There were the scuff marks of dozens of soles on the chair legs. A keyboard clicked in time with her heartbeat.

“Right. We know people don’t like you. I’d bet a lot of the people in this hell building have a bone to pick because they somehow knew you were coming before you showed up and they made sure everyone heard it. The gossip machine here is an ugly monster and it’s ruthless. Doesn’t matter that there’s like a thousand people here, it’s like a small town. Everyone knows everyone’s business. It’s actually really effing annoying. I'd be lying if I said we've never talked about you. So I'm only gonna bring this up once, then never again, unless you ever need to talk. The men in your life don’t define you, alright?”

When Tania didn’t respond, Mariam reached forward, her hand gently resting on Tania’s forearm.

“They don’t. But do you believe what this hell company said about your husband?”

“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” she said, looking at Mariam's hand now.

“Cause we don’t,” Mariam said, voice suddenly hard, and she gestured around the room so that the last of the clacking of keys stopped, and the women pretending not to listen could openly involve themselves. Despite what Mariam said, she felt herself bracing for the worst.

“So, look. Hilda here," she said, indicating a woman about Tania's age who swung to face them. "She was a visual effects artist before she came here. She said she laughed for hours when she saw those images on the news because she could do a better job.”

“What can I say? I’ve drawn a lot of porn,” Hilda mused and Mariam side eyed her.

“Anyway. They looked fake as fake gets and from a department that deals in lies within a company known for hushing scandals up not plastering them all over the news. The only person here who doesn’t think so left after getting sick of the fuzzy green puddings. I still sing her song every morning to celebrate her departure. She was-"

“A twit,” someone else said.

“Thank you, Erica. Case in point, Erica was one of the first aid workers on the ground in ‘82, and worked as a medic for years. She'll tell you the things she saw going on were indescribably horrific.”

“Every day was a series of human rights violations, or would be if humans were involved, and I think that speaks for itself about transparency or a lack of,” Erica said behind her. “Nothing here is what it pretends to be. You’re allowed to grieve your family in peace, Tania.”

“None of us like the Department of Doublethink. Or most of this company for that matter, which I can safely say because I'm a low paid pleb,” Hilda added, rolling closer. “And even if we did, none of us would care because none of it reflects on you. You’re your own person.”

"And Tania, doesn't matter if it was real and you were infected with this mythical fake illness; we don't attack people with HIV in this house, we're not going to attack you," Mariam added.

“But we do bitch about the news coming out of here a helluva lot so if you don’t want to be involved we can try not to do it around you.”

“You shouldn’t have to change things for me,” Tania said.

“Yeah, but we’re not dicks,” Hilda said.

“Right, right." Mariam pulled back her hand, slyly glancing at Hilda. "And anyway, it’s just misogynists who have a problem with you if you really listen to what comes out of idiots’ mouths."

“Everything is misogyny to you,” Hilda said, deadpan. 

“If a woman isn’t bangable she’s useless, that’s what these media people think, and who controls the media? Men do, that's who. Some people think the media is the word of God, so that’s really all it is,” Mariam continued, ignoring her protests. “You can’t argue with the truth, girls!”

“She says this, but makes sure guys buy her drinks,” Hilda said with a wink. "Which I'm surprised they take the bait, all things considered."

Mariam playfully wiggled the ends of her scarf in Hilda's face, before pointing across the room as if she were a look out spotting land. “And why wouldn’t I? Knowledge is power!" she cried. "And with that power comes the responsibility to use it to the fullest! And if these fools want something from me, and think they'll get it, that’s not my problem.”

“Right.”

“This is fine by me,” Hilda said. “Cause she doesn’t drink, and I take them on her behalf. And then listen to her bitch about them for the rest of the night.”

“Inshallah, I will have myself a good time! Men are not required.”

“Agh!" Heidi cried, voice cutting across the room. "Enough with the shouting, Mariam!” 

“Sorry,” Mariam squeaked, wincing. “We actually go out after work every Friday. You should come, Tania.”

They seemed like the perfect collection of people to have been thrust into, it was almost unreal. But before she could accept their offer, reality settled in. They might be nice. The public still wasn’t.

“It’s okay. Really I like to stay at home.”

“I insist!” Mariam cried again. “It will be your initiation ritual!”

“Oh my God, you need to chill,” Erica told her co-worker.

“You’re only saying that because you have kids. I on the other hand still have all my life ahead of me. You have all week to decide,” she said. “Don’t worry. We don’t go out looking to hook up or anything. It’s just a good place to hang out because the gigs playing there are always awesome.”

“And so is the food. And the crowd tends to be a bit older so you don’t have the youth screaming their heads off unless there’s a football playoff. Then we don’t go because I like my eardrums.”

“Hah, 'the youth'. You’re all just as loud,” Mariam snorted. “Anyway, we should start before Heidi comes out again.”

“She’s totally listening in.”

“Course she is.”

The day went by faster than Tania expected, with no more bouts of despair and no more talk of the past. As 5pm neared, Mariam began clock watching so that when it finally arrived she'd shut down every program and system in almost perfect synchronization, enabling her to both leave immediately and not spend the last ten minutes idling. 

Mariam's warnings rang true as well. Already, numerical strings were swimming around behind Tania's eyes. 

"So, how was it?"

"It was alright, actually," Tania said, trying to be louder than a whisper. "Thanks for this morning. For understanding."

Mariam smiled. “Bad things are like fridgy puddings. They can’t be avoided. They just happen because sometimes people are lazy and sometimes everyone forgets who it belonged to so it goes kinda mouldy because everyone is afraid it isn’t theirs. Or it is theirs and now they don’t wanna be called out. The people who are going to hate you over mouldy puddings just have nothing better to be needlessly angry about because it’s not affecting them really.”

“That... doesn’t really make sense,” Tania said shyly, struggling to follow.

“Pudding’s just something easy to be mad about whether it’s yours or not. Everything looks like a mouldy pudding when you think you’re not one. Just like everything looks like a nail when you’re a petty hammer.”

“Jesus, that was ridiculous,” Erica said, hand falling heavily onto Mariam’s shoulder and giving her a firm pat. “She, I _assume_, means that when you’re a raging bigot with an inferiority complex working at a soulless company in an ugly cubicle all day you’ll take any excuse to vent that inferiority on the closest available option. In this case, it is anything that reminds you of the thing you are hateful towards. But you’re angry, so everything reminds you of the thing. It only takes a few loud voices. Trust me, these girls weren’t always so chill without me around.”

“Um, okay, I guess.” Tania looked at clock. Her mother would be waiting downstairs, likely pacing. “Do I really just ask about registration or do I need something?”

“Can’t really remember getting my stuff,” Mariam said thoughtfully. “It was years ago. I’m sure they’ll let you know whatever you gotta do. But one guy has a real bad attitude and I think I saw him this morning.”

“He’s a real shit stirrer,” Erica added. “Creepy little fellow. One day I’m gonna get him fired.”

“Hmm, not sure if he deserves that. Seems a little much.”

“You’re too kind for this world, Mariam,” she said, turning back to Tania. “Until that day, just try to get the attention of the others, they’re usually nice or disinterested at worst.”

“See you tomorrow then.”

“Have a good night, Tania. It was good to finally meet you,” Erica said.

“Think about Friday, right,” Mariam added. “Right then, I’m gonna get my stuff. Bye, girls.”

Maybe it would be alright, Tania thought as she stood in front of the elevators, praying for one to be empty though imagining it couldn’t be. The morning had simply been a miracle. When she could hear the rumble of its arrival Tania bowed her head, hair falling in front of her eyes. There were people, but they didn’t try to bar her entry, perhaps not sensing her for who she was, perhaps too tired to bother. The light for the main floor was lit, so shuffling to a corner she tried to disappear. Likewise, everyone else seemed to be avoiding conversation with one another.

Back in the atrium though, with a sea of humanity between her and the reception counter, Tania had to look up to navigate through an echo chamber of monumental glass in which she couldn't help but hear a quiet ruckus of shameless commentary. 

_“Stupid bitch doesn’t really think anyone wants her here?”_

_“Wait, is that Van der Merwe?”_

_“Yep.”_

_“Ugly little shrew, isn’t she?”_

_“Thought she moved.”_

_“Thought Phyllis was kidding.”_

_“Who cares. Just ignore her.”_

_“No.”_

_“Father got her a job, I bet.”_

_“Why do you care?”_

She passed out of range of their conversation, but now that someone had brought her presence up her traitorous ears refused to close to the wave of collective muttering. She missed Cecilia’s natural deterrence and the distractions of her chattery gossip. Mariam’s kindness became like whispers in a gale.

_“Obviously involved.”_

_"So we have to put up with her?"_

_"Do you think the twenty metre rule still applies?"_

_“Woulda cut his dick off it were my husband.”_

Tania winced. How vulgar these people were. And she picked up her pace, not caring about being noticed anymore, to seek the respite she might find navigating registration. 

_“Yeah, right.”_

_“She won’t last.”_

_“Should be locked up. Isn’t it illegal?”_

_“If your family’s not involved in a cover up, sure.”_

_“Gotta be pretty brainless to have relations with those things.”_

_“Obviously.”_

_“Sounds fake. Ya’ll really believe that shit?”_

Despite there being multiple receptionists the first to look up was a thin man whose uniform reminded Tania of a hotel manager trapped in the front end and resentful for it. He raised his head, summoned she assumed by the sound of approaching footsteps and thus an approaching irritant. She recognized him easily, the unknown skeleton closet Cecilia had mentioned.

“Look who it is then,” he said dryly.

“I just need my registration package. I was told to say it’s for Miss Smit.”

“I know who you are. You’ll have to wait like everyone else. Sorry there’s no chairs. Shouldn’t take long.”

But it did. Between phone calls and the casual click of computer keys and conversations with the other receptionists on duty, Tania had just turned away to come back later when the man spoke, a smarmy smile ugly on his little face. He held a chunky yellow envelope that seemed to have been pulled from a drawer, not put together on the fly.

“Here it is! I think the printer may have broken just for you. Unfortunate timing. Don’t lose your codes. I don’t want to waste time replacing them because you’re a careless flake.”

When she didn’t respond immediately, he shook the package at her, annoyed.

“Are you going to take it or not? I don’t have all day for you.”

Tania snatched it from his grasp as she strangled a growl, keeping any sour expressions off her face while he smiled again.

“Enjoy your evening, Mrs van der Merwe.”

Too tired for any retort, Tania turned away, no longer hearing the other people around her while an uneasy suspicion came over her. Twitching she lifted a corner of the envelope and peaked at the name on a card clipped to a black lanyard, grimacing. But it was a grimace that didn’t last, supplanted by a refreshing new feeling despite the anxious desire to cry. And she recognized it as quiet and patient spite.

“How'd it go?” her mother asked, greeting her from the pick up queue that stretched across the front of the building. Pacing.

Tania smiled, trying to keep back the tears threatening at corner of her eyes. “No one who works here has any grasp of language.”

When Kathleen frowned, she added, “They’ve no idea what the word Smit means.”

But at least one receptionist would know tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do! And what she’s got to do is take advantage of her fam's status and embrace the power of nepotism. lol.
> 
> Oh, Tania, one day you'll understand why a little warning bell goes off about your parents.
> 
> Atmosphere is a year old! I can’t believe it. Get ready for a time jump, we’re entering winter 2012 and I need to make some celebratory art that'll make my mama ashamed of me and break some tumblr tos. 
> 
> If ye ever think I'm dead, tumblr's where to check for life.  
<3 ya'll
> 
> oh yeah and hmmmmmmm lol there may be some colliding of worlds upcoming, some stumbling upon, some coincidental timing, some wellllll you know... stuff.


	10. City of Decay - February 2012

** Whistleblower Found Dead [English Transcription] - February 2012**

The body of Fundiswa Mhlanga was discovered in his cell in the Johannesburg Correctional Facility, last Friday, at 3am. 

Police do not suspect foul play, and preliminary reports suggest Mhlanga, age 22, suffered an unexpected aortic aneurysm. 

Mhlanga is known widely for having illegally released documentation exposing Multi-National United’s extensive genetic research programme at the end of 2010. As the only living witness, there has been a public call for further investigation. In particular, watch dog group AHA, an activist off-shoot of UIO has demanded the case be reviewed by the State Security Agency’s domestic branch. 

UIO, long criticized for corruption in both its administration and operations, declined to comment when asked by external media outlets, and is not pressing for further investigation. 

Mhlanga’s leak cited the only other known witness as W.v.M, now a Ghost of the Nameless, as no living poleepkwa were retrieved from the multinational company’s research department. 

A memorial for Mhlanga is being held during the next New Moon. Locations to follow on the Sanctuary Dark Radio Broadcast. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> r i p fundiswa. you knew too much. 
> 
> Is there such a thing as Johannesburg Correctional Facility? I literally have no idea and if there is then um, well you know that disclaimer in films that's like relation to anything or anyone real is coincidence?  
um... that. 
> 
> it sounded like a good generic name. 
> 
> also what DOES UIO stand for? have we ever known? tell me, neill! ... actually god please don't. please never find me.


	11. A Lot of Secrets

June 2012

Several unexceptional months passed between Wikus' trip to the city and the harrowing journey home. Months made slow and tedious by the process of transcribing two more textbooks for the use of the people of the old world, who by and large could understand several human languages but could not read English well. A transcription made more slow by the nature of the subject, its reliance on illustration, and Wikus’ own lack of background in the topic.

But Ehhka was a bit of a special case when it came to these bothersome requests. They were literate in the local human languages, and dozens from the homeworld, but not confident in transcribing (which Wikus felt was a fib) and more likely (though Ehhka spared him these details) too involved in Kulka’s shit to have time. While from the outside Ehhka's involvement in the resistance seemed largely limited to City of Decay, there was enough evidence to suggest the old poleepkwa had been close to Canna and the original group. If Ehhka wasn’t quietly involved in the machinations of the North End, among other things, Wikus was ready to eat a mouldering shoe… were mouldering shoes readily available. Anything that came out if Wikus' mouth, any observation at all, Ehhka always seemed to know ahead of time. If that did not suggest deeper involvement with the underground, then what did?

For the most part they had been unusually supportive and patient. Though Canna had promised never to tell anyone about Wikus' actual background, Ehhka at least seemed to sense how isolated he was and he sometimes wondered if giving him difficult projects was more about keeping him busy than an actual need. Like Kulka, and frankly Fletcher too, Ehhka was critical of some of his other pastimes, the ones that filled the spaces between the dreadfully boring transcription process and his waning ability to focus.

And their criticisms were perfectly reasonable. Wikus just didn't care. 

The first time someone brought him something entirely nonhuman, he'd nearly turned them away with a good berating, but when they gave him no deadline the temptation to see what it did was too tantalizing. Initially he treated tinkering with poleepkwa technology as an intellectual challenge. Sometimes he forgot about the misery his life was slipping into and forgot about where he was.

So while the projector he'd been wasting time with was battered, scratched up, with most of the original white and orange paint chipped away, Wikus still had hopes for it.

He still didn't understand these things. Not really. Wikus knew he didn't have the intelligence for that, even if by some magic a technician descended from the heavens and attempted to explain everything. But he supposed it was a very human thing, and from the curiosity of his neighbours also a very alien thing, to want to explore what was beyond their reach, to put things together and see what would happen, even if they could never understand why it worked, simply that it worked.

So with this mindset, his shanty had been nearly destroyed on several occasions. Any reasonable person would recognize that taking a lightning gun apart amounted to either utter madness or pure stupidity. But those people weren't gripped by the unique almost euphoric freedom that outright apathy gave a person. Of course his home would be destroyed the second an MNU raid descended on him, and so would he. It certainly didn't look like the shack of a weapons dealer, which Wikus certainly didn't deal in. More like a bitter and zany hermit, tinkering life away, without the privilege of lonely solitude, perhaps even bitter on account of it. That didn't matter. The activity remained an avenue of death. 

And still he didn't care.

Then one day he’d been visiting someone who’d commissioned him, giddy from the success of having figured out by complete accident how to repair a small tablet pen, and had spied the scratched up device sitting inside a box overflowing with unfamiliar but undoubtedly alien clutter. He remembered seeing it in an instant, through a memory of a planet and its seven satellites which once hovered blue above such a device, in a long ago time, in the home of Christopher Johnson. Right before Oliver slapped a brochure out of his ama’s hands and Wikus announced his presence before the eavesdropping went on too long.

So he’d taken it home with him as repayment instead of something more sensible like flour. Useless object, its owner felt.

A projector, naturally, was a much harder puzzle to solve than a simple pen with similar properties to those already on Earth. For a long time he didn’t even know which buttons were meant to turn it on until Fletcher had popped by to say hello and then gone off on him about it.

“Your parents sheltered the hell out of you,” she’d said, and when she pressed the right button, to no one's surprise nothing happened. “Stop collecting broken junk, you’re not a carrion mite.”

So it was with much satisfaction months later that he was knocking at midnight, scaring her half to death, and dragging her and Shepherd out of bed and up the road.

“Fucking fixed it!” he declared.

“God, you’re spiteful.”

As Fletcher tried to rub her tired eyes, complaining about waking in a few hours for work, she didn’t try to break his grip as they trotted up the street but tightened a brown overcoat around her chest, shivering. Shepherd bounced happily behind her.

“Who’s hungry? I’m hungry,” Shepherd said.

“God, you’re getting worse than Protea. I thought we were being raided.”

“Why would be you be raided?” Wikus asked, raising a scaly eyebrow in a very human gesture that was most common among the younger generation.

“Why is anyone! Just open the door. Enough with the knocking. They always knock. You don’t need to knock.”

Shepherd, meanwhile, thoughtfully gnawed her fingers before piping up.

“There was that one time you ate-”

In a violent motion, Fletcher pulled free, smothering Shepherd before she had time to deflect the attack.

“Don’t,” she growled, “say stupid things at night.”

“Pfft, whatever. What did you fix? Is it fun? I hope it’s fun. It better be fun and not lame.”

“It’s obviously that stupid projector.” 

“And how would _you_ know?” Shepherd said before she rounded on him. “Do you share things with her and not with me!”

“Because he wouldn’t be so smug. God, please let it be the projector.”

“What else would it be?” he said smoothly. “Another radio?”

Shepherd beamed. “Speaking of Protea-”

“No!” she snapped. “No, we’re not doing that.”

“You Know Whose radio broadcast is tonight,” Shepherd cut across.

Fletcher threw a hand over her tentacles again.

“Aff, I cath breaf, sta et!”

“Then stop talking!”

“Hurry up, it’s cold out here,” Wikus said, ducking inside his neglected shack. The ceiling had begun dipping on one side at the whims of the prevailing wind, and he hadn’t been bothered to fix it, Shepherd barking as her head hit the corner.

“Damnit, shrimpy! But it _is_ a radio night,” she continued as Fletcher followed her in. “And I haven’t listened to it in forever.”

“Because you ain’t doing it in my house,” Fletcher said, sitting on his cot and pulling off her coat. She scratched at the pale striations on her carapace, making a concerted effort to ignore both of them, while Wikus turned the light back on and the lampshade cast strange shadows around the walls.

“Yeah, I do it in _his_. But he’s ‘always busy’ now. It’s like you don’t like me anymore.”

“I like you fine," Wikus said. "I’m busy.”

A couple nights a week, up until four months ago, Shepherd invaded his home and they would sit together in the dark, laying awkwardly against a wall so they might share a single set of headphones, each with one ear bud draped on their heads, the wire conveniently secured on the smaller horns in their foreheads.

As comical a sight it may be, it allowed them to hear the broadcast that Fletcher so hated in complete privacy, the volume so low that holding the headphones but a few centimetres away it would be unheard, by humans anyway. For you would hate to know someone might be listening in on days when there was little music to be played.

Wikus was rarely interested. The entire affair did nothing save twist him up with more unneeded anxieties.

Some nights the radio was simply a faster means of disseminating information than the underground press could ever be and far more accessible than print. The three nights a week they broadcast anything at all, it was simply a cultural hub. Still dangerous, he thought, but tracking the source was no easy task. But sometimes, and that night always changed, the hosts and their guests discussed the truly dangerous.

Right now it would likely just be music and the preservation of culture, which was less of a reason for distress and more of a reason for Shepherd, whose entire soul was wrapped in music, to be drawn towards the risk.

But there were more important things to share right now! Or to brag about.

Like the grubby, scratched up box sitting on the counter at which Fletcher stared irritably, pedipalps twitching.

“You know this is the kind of shit that’s going to screw you over in the end, Sky.”

“It’s a projector.”

“It’s off-world tech. You should be throwing this stuff out not hording it.”

“Yeah, yeah. You done lecturing or do you want to see what’s on it?”

“I do!” Shepherd said, pulling it off the counter without hesitation and turning it on.

Blue light filled the shack, overpowering the yellow bulb suspended above them.

“I can’t believe you figured it out,” she said. “How does it work?”

“That button on the side scrolls through a bit, and then there’s a holographic screen. Press the side button seven times.”

“It’s always seven, isn’t it?” Fletcher muttered.

Ignoring her, Shepherd flicked through until a menu opened, strings of blue text hovering above them. “Hell yeah, this is going to be awesome!”

And with a crackle, the projector shut off.

“Hah!”

Wikus glared as Fletcher doubled over, nearly tumbling off the cot while she shook with laughter. 

But slouching in her seat, Shepherd leaned forward and began poking buttons again. “Aw, I wanted to see things! What if there were films!”

“I don’t want to be blown up with you,” Fletcher said, Wikus rolling his eyes as she spoke. “This is only marginally better than the arc rifle. Which I see you haven’t gotten rid of.”

“What’s it going to do? Come alive at night and shoot me?”

He'd never made a real effort to do anything with it, except take the thing apart. It lived ominously in the open, on the counter, another thing he couldn’t be bothered to put away.

“No that’s what-”

The audio crackled with static, Shepherd tuning stations.

_...another night, another night. Next up, Canellac's Symphony, from the Sixth Era, _the first radio host said.

_Not my favourite time period._

_Or genre, is it? _

“-the First Battalion scum is for - _turn that off! _It’s a full moon, for fuck’s sake, are you crazy!”

Shepherd lifted the tiny radio out of her reach lest she smash it.

“But the _music. _We’re awake anyway.” Shepherd shook her away, and the noise cut out as an audio jack was plugged in, Shepherd awkwardly balancing the headphones on her scalp.

“Have you eaten this week?” Fletcher suddenly asked, poking at the cupboards and their contents – or lack of. “I haven’t smelled bread in days.

“I ran out of oil.”

“Amber has a tiny oven. The pink one with a light bulb.”

A toy, and a very useful one at that. It had been a unexpected discovery, not the usual thing one expected to scavenge now that they were so separated from the city's trash. All it had needed was a new lightbulb, which hadn't been difficult to find.

“And flour.”

“You can borrow some from me,” Shepherd said. “Gets that shit outta my house.”

“You work. You need it more.”

“Really got to get your papers sorted out.”

“Little late,” he said.

“Get Fletcher to take you next time the UIO people come by. She’ll explain everything and say you’re a kid instead of a shrimp and then you can stop being a mouse when you get a ration card.”

“You still work.”

“Yeah, well, they feed us slop at lunch. I actually kinda like it… but it’s the symbolic meaning that counts.”

“It’ll be fine when I finish that,” he said, gesturing to a mountain of paperwork looming over the very defective and useless arc rifle, “or when Protea comes by.”

“Not if you starve before finishing.”

“It’s the illustrations, they’re time consuming. I don’t have time for eating.”

“Let me help,” Shepherd said. She pulled out the headphones so that the room was filled with the oddest song he’d ever heard, and might ever hear, for poleepkwa music was a bit of reversal to what he knew, with the melody provided mostly by instruments and the quieter percussion preformed by vocalists. “I can’t write but I’m good at copying more things than just dumb kids. This living alone shit is only for audit days. Nobody else torments themselves like this.”

“I like being alone.”

“Fletcher says you’re depressed. Whatever that means.”

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

“Obviously you are, cause you don’t eat.”

“Leave it til tomorrow; nagging isn’t going to change him. It’s time to go home,” Fletcher grumbled. “I’m going back to-”

But neither of Shepherd nor Wikus were listening to her as cracks like fireworks filled the room, replacing the music.

“-bed.”

“Speaking of raids,” Shepherd said quietly, dropping the volume down as the gunfire picked up. But Wikus moved closer and rose the volume again, letting the chatter fill the room, thinking it was better to know what was happening than sit in the dark.

“Did they just say sector seventy eight?” Fletcher asked. “That’s two neighbourhoods over. Chacma Row. Do you think the broadcast comes out of there?”

“No, someone’s probably sending a live recording in,” Wikus said, noting the slight delay between escalating screams, the radio hosts’ commentary, and what distant sounds drifted in through the window. But he was still disturbed. Violence here often travelled like a windborn fire and suddenly he flicked off the lights. “Better not to go anywhere now.”

“Please turn it off,” Fletcher said. “I really didn’t need this tonight. Do we know anybody there?”

“No,” Wikus said.

“Then let’s turn it off.”

_Seven prawns reported among the dead, is it?_

_Good riddance, really. _

_No room for traitors here._

_No food for them either._

The radio hosts laughed, a sound strangely devoid of humour, Fletcher began tapping her foot.

_Retaliation for last week's dramatics, don't you think?_

_Most definitely. _

"Of course it is!" Fletcher snapped. "Why do we need to listen to- no, don't go outside!"

Wikus hadn't realized what he was doing until he was suddenly standing on the roof, having made the small jump. He looked west, where the darkness was lit orange and acrid smoke he could taste on the air rose into the sky, fueled by the consumption of canvas and wood. Two of his neighbours met his eyes from across the street, before in easy leaps they’d joined him, Shepherd and Fletcher barking at the sudden bangs from below. A few other people were emerging from their houses now, peering between the shanties. 

“It’s coming east,” one of them said.

“Get down!” Fletcher hissed.

Wikus watched the flames in a bit of a daze, not hearing her. When had he ever given thought to the day ahead of tomorrow?

While the smoke curled into the night, black haloed by red, the horizon blurred out and was obscured. The stillness of the air carried the occasional screams, far further than any human scream might travel, those horrible yelps too high pitched for humans to even hear.

They would have thought about tomorrow, the people now overwhelmed by destruction and the chaotic explosion of gunpowder. But for Wikus never had a week ahead or even two days ahead mattered in anything more than an intellectual experiment. The farthest into the future his mind wandered was the abstract notion of general survival. Of not being the people dying in Chacma Row, of keeping quiet and quietly carrying on, with the occasional rise of the black dogs calling him to the end of it.

His old life existed now as something abstract too.

And maybe he could have spoken to Ehhka about it, could have asked Canna if that was safe, had Canna not faced the same final moments that he now witnessed from a blind distance.

He felt sure that the historian would be able to help. With his past or present... or even Tania. But he also felt sure if he so much as whispered her name Ehhka would make the connection in seconds. Unlike Shepherd, they were extraordinarily perceptive.

So in the face of death, watching it play out and make its way towards their own community (though he doubted it would come quite so far east tonight), that left him with the question… what to do about Tania or the past. Or his parents, for that matter. He hadn’t moved on. And it was probably time he did, instead of existing in a state of trance, a state of stasis.

The future Canna envisioned for the people she loved and the people who had loved her had never accounted for her people to return for them, to rescue them from Earth. Her grandparents' world was not her world. Twenty years of work was not halted by the mothership's departure or Christopher’s heroic return.

Which meant unless the poleepkwa were forced to go back, they had a future here. And so might he.

But as his existence might be a brief one anyway what was abstract sometimes became more solid.

“I’m going back to the city,” he said, as Fletcher continued to shout, a futile figure below. The younger poleepkwa beside him tilted their head curiously, before muttering something to their friend about what to do if the fires spread.

Then Fletcher's claws came screeching across sheet metal, a squeal too weak to overcome the distant violence, and Wikus turned to her seconds before she leapt down dragging him bodily off the roof.

“I couldn’t hear you over the noise. What the hell are you doing up there!”

“I’m going inside.”

“Finally some sense out of one of you.”

Following him in, with Shepherd squirming in her hands and squawking a hundred curses, Fletcher locked the door and dropped onto the cot, head in her hands.

“Hide that fucking thing,” she muttered, gesturing to the rifle. “They might come this way.”

Wikus shuffled a floorboard, sorting quickly through the clutter to make just enough space to cram both the rifle and projector inside. Seconds before he closed it all up, he pulled a rail line map to the top of the pile.

“There is so much death,” he said quietly, but Shepherd’s chin suddenly rested on top of his head.

“Death is life, shrimpy. It’s not something to get gloomy over.”

“Don’t be so insensitive,” Fletcher said, green eyes flashing her way.

So Wikus decided. He would go back one last time to make sure Tania was safe, and if she wasn’t then he’d ask Ehhka for help.

And then he’d try to find a way to let go.

***

As luck would have it, two days after the riot in Chacma, UIO still ran their shuttle and Wikus, wide awake and dressed before any one of his neighbours might notice and be alerted to his intentions was already halfway to the pickup, deftly avoiding any taglings who might trouble him before the sunrise.

He had a chalk sketch of the rail lines on his forearm, hidden under a bulky sleeve and easy to destroy if something unforeseen required doing so, but had memorized several relevant crossings he could use Monday to go one direction or the other. Having physical maps would be too dangerous, especially after what happened in Cape Town. It touched his mind that he might not go back. Not to Tania’s home and not to the district.

Just somewhere else entirely. Away from the living and away from his personal calamity.

But at the last minute, he veered away from the shuttle stop where they might record his departure and thus failure to return. He’d been lucky the first time he missed the shuttle with Shepherd. So with a long wait before light crept over the horizon, Wikus knew close by was a break in the Wall in a poorly monitored area where he could slip under the fencing and cross the No Man’s Land without worry. Then he'd be well on his way, traversing through the countryside.

There might be nothing quite as thrilling, and terrifically terrifying, as the moments spent waiting in tall grass and taller trees, as death comes rumbling forward at 60km/h with a scream that would make a tornado quail. Anticipating the jump and the gale that might blow you back off the tracks.

Acclimatized towards disaster though he ought to be, (with massacring psychopathic mercenaries, crashing an airship, and nearly getting eaten being among in his all time lows), those seventy four sparsely remembered hours did not make easier the two years that followed. As much as he wished it to be so, there was no getting used to violence or desensitized to stress. It seemed the nature of living things, or at least for himself, that trauma had longevity not solved by repeated exposure. He seethed thinking about it, why such an overwhelming amount of grief dared not be adaptable.

Before he knew it, Wikus was rattling along on a kilometre worth of freight train, squeezed between two cargo containers and largely, though not entirely, sheltered from a cold wind, his exposed fingers and toes quickly going numb. A shadow among shadows, Wikus tried to arrange himself to be more comfortable. But the violent roar of iron on steel coupled with the tentacle freezing air made this all but impossible.

It was almost too loud to hear his own thoughts.

So perhaps in this the tornado would feel envy and not fright, Wikus mused, trying to put the aches and jolting pains of the journey out of his head. Likewise, he wished to forget exactly how long covering over 200km of land would take tonight, with the train moving slower. He bet around three or four hours of abject misery.

After hour one, having burrowed entirely into his drafty sweater so that the only exposed portion of his head were two unfortunate antenna, any hope of sorting out or planning conversations with Ehhka (or maybe even Tania) had fled. He was simply too cold to think. He’d spend the walk dwelling instead.

In Joburg's peripheral suburbs, Wikus hopped off where the train slowed a few kilometres in preparation to pass through the city as the sun cracked over a grey horizon, heading towards a non-residential zone before the curfew lifted and an over-observant window watcher noticed him. A problem he could have avoided had he taken the shuttle and somehow got back to it before departure. Except Tania probably wouldn’t be home and he couldn’t just walk up to her door with the sun glaring high above. He imagined the star judging him for another poor decision, up there in the heavens where it had no worries or concerns.

He chose a hiding place behind a collection of dumpsters, bordering restaurants that wouldn’t open until lunchtime, in an unfamiliar place, hoping to find and follow major roads until reaching familiar territory. And two hours after the curfew lifted, Wikus popped out onto the empty, quiet sidewalk, stiff and desperately needing to stretch his legs.

Already he was dreading the train ride back. As he bid the alley dumpster farewell, he thought to perhaps look for a relatively clean trash bag later. One that held paperwork or something free of mysterious fluids and old food, which he could use as a windbreaker and maybe stuff with newspaper for extra insulation. It wasn’t as if he could just creep into a shop and buy a jacket even if he had the income.

Without Shepherd the city was a different beast. Even if he never walked with confidence her size and unapproachable nature were a protective factor. Now he was alone and barely any taller than an adult man, or his old self, which he idly attributed to digitgrade feet. Certainly he was much skinnier.

Maybe he'd win in a fight; being tiny and weedy didn’t seem to negate the ludicrous strength imbalance between each species. Except he’d actually be required to hurt a person and there were a plethora of reasons not to, such as the appearance of men with guns and tear gas.

No thanks.

So more skittish than usual, and flinching at footsteps which came too close, where once pedestrians awkwardly crossed the streets or veered away from Shepherd’s surly appearance and outright scowls, Wikus tried keep his head down and shrink into the landscape, a grey little prawn just minding his miserable business, not worth interacting with or even glancing at. And still he couldn’t make up conversations in his mind, or decide if he ought to try and talk to Tania, far too on edge and wholly absorbed in the actions of the people around him. A man cleared his throat and Wikus shuffled away, unsure if it was merely a cough. A child skipped loudly on the pavement. Car horns blared regularly at one another on jammed, overcrowded roads. A couple holding hands muttered an insult but paled when they realized he could hear.

Through this method he managed to navigate Joburg with minimal incident for eight hours, with the intent to loiter strategically around the library near his home.

Or Tania’s home. Really Wikus wasn’t sure anymore.

When he arrived, he set about his plan, carefully circling the area without repeatedly using the same road, to avoid looking suspicious and ignore the sudden stirring of hunger as the scent of food permeated every bit of air like a summer heat mirage. In the meantime, he could use the time for reconnaissance, find a place to hide before the curfew.

After two wide circuits that covered several kilometres of ground, the park he'd spent the evening in with Shepherd seemed like as good an option as any. He was quickly becoming unfamiliar with the area, now at the fringe's of his own neighbourhood. And he felt like eyes were on him.

Across the street, the kids chatted idly. They were a motley band, likely between the ages of eleven and fifteen. Seven boys, dressed in jeans, plain sneakers, and t-shirts, one donning a leather jacket, the others braving the chill early winter air. They padded casually along, tossing a softball between one another, unconcerned for the windows a poor catch might smash. None of them were menacing in the slightest, baseball bat or no.

It was just a feeling.

Forget the plan.

Best to find a suitable hiding place with haste. There were too many meddlesome people here, too much traffic. His feet were getting tired anyway and sitting would give him time to think. Wikus took another side street. He needed, preferably, an overgrown ravine accessible from the street rather than through backyards which would surely be walled. He was just too weary to spend time leaping through courtyards and over rooftops without drawing negative attention.

And those brats were starting to bug him.

As he crossed an intersection so did they.

Well, maybe it was nothing. They were kids, school was out, they must have lived somewhere.

He listened for footsteps, they seemed to have stopped, and he took the opportunity to pass through a narrow driveway between the two buildings, to an unpaved employee parking lot and the sidewalk beyond, where there looked to be an open stretch of parkland. A change of direction was just what he needed.

Then something hit the wall beside his head with a wallop, throwing brick dust in his face. Wikus didn’t wait to see what it was. Behind him the boyish squawk of a child came with the sudden return of footsteps. Quick ones.

Well, there were still seven of them!

He sailed across the street, a truck's horn blaring, then ran through the park’s gate, never looking back, past a row of yellowwoods, along a low stone fence, eyes on the distant road while listening to the chatter at his back.

He knew the children were following in earnest, their little lungs wheezing, but he was faster and springier, even as their heels slapped against the pathway.

On the far side of the park and the road, the land suddenly ended, dipping into a deep valley whose maze of living obstructions waited to lend their aid.

Absolutely perfect. Such luck!

A weird, soft crack came racing down the path, and he yelped, pain exploding across his back like a shot. Wikus fell sideways as a large baseball rolled cheerily in the opposite direction while he tumbled over, a tangle of limbs and sand, the children using the pause to close some of the distance.

But not enough.

He’d fallen at the base of an old, twisted tree with peeling grey bark and a sparse sprinkling of leaves. A paperbark. Large enough and tall enough to be well out of reach. Jumping, Wikus latched onto a limb about three metres overhead. With the bad luck of a thousand worlds on his side, a dual pronged thorn dug into his palm. Hissing, he scrabbled at the branch, crawling on top of it as the kids circled below, heads strained backwards to find him. Their breath rattled in their lungs and they took a moment to recover before they could do more than sputter.

“Come down!”

“No.”

“Scared, little prawn?”

“Go step off a bridge,” Wikus said, glaring at this over-gifted batter who was young enough and short enough still to use the wooden bat like a cane, leaning half his weight onto one hip and wobbling idly.

“You’re trespassing,” the kid declared, squinting. He was probably twelve, but carried himself like the cockiest little brat in the world. “You know what happens to trespassers?”

“Trespassing where?”

“This park.”

“This park that you chased me into?”

“Bet you could knock it out of there,” said the tallest kid, a lanky fellow who donned the leather coat. While it made him stand out and he looked a little older, Wikus suspected the kid with the bat was their ring leader and the person to focus on. Though he had retrieved the softball, it was doubtful they’d be able to throw it with any degree of force without the risk of gravity thwarting them and loosening a few teeth. Or Wikus catching it, and lending gravity a hand. They didn't know his dexterity was sporadically reliable.

“The longer you stay up there the worse it’ll get for ya!” 

A good point, but Wikus, well versed in harassment, was already eyeing escape routes. Namely, a stand of defoliating sweetgum trees in hopping distance, pleasantly free of thorns. The trouble was if he fell, perhaps from getting a thorn in a paw at the last second and messing up what should have been a simple leap, then the collective cockiness of seven vigilante children became a legitimate threat rather than a mere difficulty.

“We’re not gonna hurt you,” the batter said.

“We just wanna talk, yeah.”

“Right," Wikus said. "You hit me in the back with a fucking baseball.”

The batter shrugged noncommittally. “Accident." 

He could have scoffed at their brusque and artless change of tactic. They were kids, after all, no real shock that they lacked any skill in manipulation. Yet they remained an obstacle between him and the ravine if he didn't want to maim them to get there.

“Smarter than the last one," another said, "isn’t it?”

The kid sneered. “We’ll just wait for the curfew then. See if you like running from the night police’s dogs.”

“They don’t have dogs,” Wikus said, annoyed. What weak lies these children were capable of.

“They do now.”

“Since Saturday,” another kid added, triggering the rest of them.

“Maybe if you didn’t blow people up for fun we wouldn’t have to.”

“Da says you're too stupid to know better but I don’t believe it. You know.”

“That why you’re sneaking around? Planning to bomb our school?”

“You’re the ones who chased me over here!" Wikus snapped, ready to start flicking thorns at them. "From a fucking main street!”

“You looked suspicious.”

Just across the road, on the far side of the park, the ravine cut a swath of dark through the houses and though the leaves were thinning out, the trees quickly becoming a tangle of grey sentinels through which the stream was now visible, it would also be difficult for humans to see without light and so a prime location for hiding purposes once the sun went down. If they were going to wait him out, he’d wait them out too. And a better place to do so was that sweetgum tree, about ten metres away and a delightful ten metres closer to the ravine.

“What’s this about dogs?” he asked, discreetly eyeing the jump and what thorns might be in his path.

“German Shepherds. Giants. Could bite you in half.”

“That’s not new,” Wikus said.

“No, the deadly force part is.”

It was exactly the kind of bullshit children would make up or hear from their parents and misinterpret. What stopped a dog from injuring a fleeing human if they were trained to kill something that looked incredibly similar rather than just help apprehend them? And poleepkwa were often much faster than dogs when they needed to be. No one would be so reckless with human life. If they were, Protea or Kulka would have published something so significant immediately, being the first people to know just about any change through channels Wikus couldn’t guess at (and didn’t want to know about, frankly). It was asinine.

“Shaking in my boots,” Wikus said dryly, and hopped to the next tree.

Upon which the nearest branch snapped, dumping him unceremoniously onto the ground. But he was up in seconds, already hoisting himself into the sweetgum before the children had closed even half the distance. And when the very gifted batter took another go at him with the softball, Wikus simply caught it, jarring his wrist but otherwise satisfied and more than a little surprised.

“Give that back!”

“You’re a thief!”

“I wonder how far it would go if I threw it from here,” Wikus mused.

“You better not fucking throw it!”

“Leave me alone and I’ll leave it on that bench and you can come back for it.”

“Give it back _now_!”

Yup, still just children in their priorities. But they were pissed off now for sure. He wondered what they would do if he did pitch it across the park. Forsake the thing or run after it in hopes it wasn’t lost in the darkness.

The sun was falling with speed, the landscape briefly tinted orange as dusk leeched away the colour. Another shadow was moving through the park now, just at a comfortable stroll, hands in pockets, hood pulled up, head down, minding their own business. Wikus hoped the man, who from a distance looked considerably bulky under that hoodie continued on his way, kept out of things.

Unfortunately the ruckus was enough to draw his attention.

Wikus might be tempted to despair that life was a series of bad to worse scenarios if not for squirming out of such impending doom so regularly and the ravine still offered itself as a viable refuge. A fully grown adult with the ability to think more critically though? Not a breath of fresh air. But manageable.

Hands still stuffed in his pockets the man swore, then removed his arm as if to ward them off.

“Get fuckin’ away from it, you stupid kids!” he raged, vehemently, voice booming like a wrestler ready to throw down, so startling violent that Wikus almost longed for anyone else no matter how problematic they'd be. “You wanna get your fucking arms ripped off? Go home!”

“What’s it gonna do, it’s trapped up there,” the batter said. “It’s not coming down.”

“Too scared of us,” leather coat added.

“Get moving. _Now_,” the man growled. “I’ve already called the police.”

“Then we should stay so it can’t run away. It’s a thief. It stole my softball.”

“You want to get killed over a fucking baseball? I said go fucking home,” he snapped. Even from a distance his anger was palpable with scarce room for negotiation and the kids were nervous, eyes shifting between one another, silently communicating. “It won’t come down. If it does, I’ll shoot the fucking thing. Now get out of here.”

“Fine!” the batter said, spitting to the side. “Alright. Not interesting anymore anyway.”

The man watched them go and so did Wikus. Now that it was just one person, he debated climbing higher and wobbling across a branch to leap to yet another tree more desperate than a squirrel, which felt bitterly appropriate, both being considered cursed and introduced species. He was unquestionably faster than this human, and one person however large under their hoodie could not mob him the same way the kids could. But he was not faster than a bullet from the man’s weapon would be, had that been an honest threat and not a mere bluff. Paralyzed by indecision, he looked back towards the road, peering through the leaves for any sign of whirling lights. If police came, he was fucked. They wouldn’t think twice about firing into the tree, and if for some godforsaken reason they were uncharacteristically merciful then he’d still be dragged home to the psychopaths of the district. So the question was would it be better to try and run rather than waiting for death to arrive on its own.

“I think it’s safe to come down now,” the man said suddenly, the pitch of his voice losing some of its violence. “But you can probably see better than me.”

When Wikus didn’t move, he continued, “Don’t worry, I don’t actually have a gun. But the night police are going to come if those kids say anything to their parents.”

“How do I know you’re…” Wikus trailed off.

Why were adults different?

“… not trying to…”

Why couldn’t he just snark at them like he could at children? They had the same amount of power regardless of age. The law was firmly on their side.

But he managed to spit it out in the end.

“…trick me into coming down?”

“If I had a gun, why would I shoot you on the ground when I can just shoot you from here? Maybe you’d break your neck falling out too, which would do me a favour. I don’t like fights. You really aren’t supposed to be in parks.”

“I wasn’t. They chased me here from – I don’t even know where I am anymore.”

“This is zoned residential.”

Wikus ignored the obvious, increasingly annoyed with the situation.

“They said they’re using dogs to kill people.”

“They are. I promise I’m not trying to pull anything. You’re in a suburb called Meadowhill and this is really the last place a prawn should be.”

“I’m fast, you know. Faster than you can shoot.”

“I can believe it,” the man said calmly. “You’d be a lot faster down here.”

“Ugh, the universe hates me,” he said to himself, before smashing any anxiety into the ever growing pit to which it belonged and shambling down.

Now that they were closer, he could see how small the man’s frame was hidden under the bulk of his clothing, and in the shadow of the tree he pulled back his hood, pale blonde hair spilling out over his shoulders.

“You’re-”

“A woman?” Tania laughed, the last trace of masculinity gone from her voice. “I know.”

And her fingers closed over his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :"D


End file.
